he had betrayed the guilty secret which appeared to exist, or it
might come from Beddoes, warning an old confederate that such a
betrayal was imminent. So far it seemed clear enough. But then how
could this letter be trivial and grotesque, as described by the son?
He must have misread it. If so, it must have been one of those
ingenious secret codes which mean one thing while they seem to mean
another. I must see this letter. If there were a hidden meaning in
it, I was confident that I could pluck it forth. For an hour I sat
pondering over it in the gloom, until at last a weeping maid brought
in a lamp, and close at her heels came my friend Trevor, pale but
composed, with these very papers which lie upon my knee held in his
grasp. He sat down opposite to me, drew the lamp to the edge of the
table, and handed me a short note scribbled, as you see, upon a
single sheet of gray paper. 'The supply of game for London is going
steadily up,' it ran. 'Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, has been now
told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for preservation of your
hen-pheasant's life.'
"I dare say my face looked as bewildered as yours did just now when
first I read this message. Then I reread it very carefully. It was
evidently as I had thought, and some secret meaning must lie buried
in this strange combination of words. Or could it be that there was a
prearranged significance to such phrases as 'fly-paper' and
'hen-pheasant'? Such a meaning would be arbitrary and could not be
deduced in any way. And yet I was loath to believe that this was the
case, and the presence of the word Hudson seemed to show that the
subject of the message was as I had guessed, and that it was from
Beddoes rather than the sailor. I tried it backwards, but the
combination 'life pheasant's hen' was not encouraging. Then I tried
alternate words, but neither 'the of for' nor 'supply game London'
promised to throw any light upon it.
"And then in an instant the key of the riddle was in my hands, and I
saw that every third word, beginning with the first, would give a
message which might well drive old Trevor to despair.
"It was short and terse, the warning, as I now read it to my
companion:
"'The game is up. Hudson has told all. Fly for your life.'
"Victor Trevor sank his face into his shaking hands, 'It must be
that, I suppose,' said he. "This is worse than death, for it means
disgrace as well. But what is the meaning of these "head-keepers" and
"hen-pheasants"?
"'It means nothing to the message, but it might mean a good deal to
us if we had no other means of discovering the sender. You see that
he has begun by writing "The ... game ... is," and so on. Afterwards
he had, to fulfill the prearranged cipher, to fill in any two words
in each space. He would naturally use the first words which came to
his mind, and if there were so many which referred to sport among
them, you may be tolerably sure that he is either an ardent shot or
interested in breeding. Do you know anything of this Beddoes?'
"'Why, now that you mention it,' said he, 'I remember that my poor
father used to have an invitation from him to shoot over his
preserves every autumn.'
"'Then it is undoubtedly from him that the note comes,' said I. 'It
only remains for us to find out what this secret was which the sailor
Hudson seems to have held over the heads of these two wealthy and
respected men.'
"'Alas, Holmes, I fear that it is one of sin and shame!' cried my
friend. 'But from you I shall have no secrets. Here is the statement
which was drawn up by my father when he knew that the danger from
Hudson had become imminent. I found it in the Japanese cabinet, as he
told the doctor. Take it and read it to me, for I have neither the
strength nor the courage to do it myself.'
"These are the very papers, Watson, which he handed to me, and I will
read them to you, as I read them in the old study that night to him.
They are endorsed outside, as you see, 'Some particulars of the
voyage of the bark Gloria Scott, from her leaving Falmouth on the 8th
October, 1855, to her destruction in N. Lat. 15?20', W. Long. 25? 14' on Nov. 6th.' It is in the form of a letter, and runs in this
way:
"'My dear, dear son, now that approaching disgrace begins to darken
the closing years of my life, I can write with all truth and honesty
that it is not the terror of the law, it is not the loss of my
position in the county, nor is it my fall in the eyes of all who have
known me, which cuts me to the heart; but it is the thought that you
should come to blush for me--you who love me and who have seldom, I
hope, had reason to do other than respect me. But if the blow falls
which is forever hanging over me, then I should wish you to read
this, that you may know straight from me how far I have been to
blame. On the other hand, if all should go well (which may kind God
Almighty grant!), then if by any chance this paper should be still
undestroyed and should fall into your hands, I conjure you, by all
you hold sacred, by the memory of your dear mother, and by the love
which had been between us, to hurl it into the fire and to never give
one thought to it again.
"'If then your eye goes onto read this line, I know that I shall
already have been exposed and dragged from my home, or as is more
likely, for you know that my heart is weak, by lying with my tongue
sealed forever in death. In either case the time for suppression is
past, and every word which I tell you is the naked truth, and this I
swear as I hope for mercy.
"'My name, dear lad, is not Trevor. I was James Armitage in my
younger days, and you can understand now the shock that it was to me
a few weeks ago when your college friend addressed me in words which
seemed to imply that he had surprised my secret. As Armitage it was
that I entered a London banking-house, and as Armitage I was
convicted of breaking my country's laws, and was sentenced to
transportation. Do not think very harshly of me, laddie. It was a
debt of honor, so called, which I had to pay, and I used money which
was not my own to do it, in the certainty that I could replace it
before there could be any possibility of its being missed. But the
most dreadful ill-luck pursued me. The money which I had reckoned
upon never came to hand, and a premature examination of accounts
exposed my deficit. The case might have been dealt leniently with,
but the laws were more harshly administered thirty years ago than
now, and on my twenty-third birthday I found myself chained as a
felon with thirty-seven other convicts in 'tween-decks of the bark
Gloria Scott, bound for Australia.
"'It was the year '55 when the Crimean war was at its height, and the
old convict ships had been largely used as transports in the Black
Sea. The government was compelled, therefore, to use smaller and less
suitable vessels for sending out their prisoners. The Gloria Scott
had been in the Chinese tea-trade, but she was an old-fashioned,
heavy-bowed, broad-beamed craft, and the new clippers had cut her
out. She was a five-hundred-ton boat; and besides her thirty-eight
jail-birds, she carried twenty-six of a crew, eighteen soldiers, a
captain, three mates, a doctor, a chaplain, and four warders. Nearly
a hundred souls were in her, all told, when we set said from
Falmouth.
"'The partitions between the cells of the convicts, instead of being
of thick oak, as is usual in convict-ships, were quite thin and
frail. The man next to me, upon the aft side, was one whom I had
particularly noticed when we were led down the quay. He was a young
man with a clear, hairless face, a long, thin nose, and rather
nut-cracker jaws. He carried his head very jauntily in the air, had a
swaggering style of walking, and was, above all else, remarkable for
his extraordinary height. I don't think any of our heads would have
come up to his shoulder, and I am sure that he could not have
measured less than six and a half feet. It was strange among so many
sad and weary faces to see one which was full of energy and
resolution. The sight of it was to me like a fire in a snow-storm. I
was glad, then, to find that he was my neighbor, and gladder still
when, in the dead of the night, I heard a whisper close to my ear,
and found that he had managed to cut an opening in the board which
separated us.
"'"Hullo, chummy!" said he, "what's your name, and what are you here
for?"
"'I answered him, and asked in turn who I was talking with.
"'"I'm Jack Prendergast," said he, "and by God! You'll learn to bless
my name before you've done with me."
"'I remembered hearing of his case, for it was one which had made an
immense sensation throughout the country some time before my own
arrest. He was a man of good family and of great ability, but on
incurably vicious habits, who had be an ingenious system of fraud
obtained huge sums of money from the leading London merchants.
"'"Ha, ha! You remember my case!" said he proudly.
"'"Very well, indeed."
"'"Then maybe you remember something queer about it?"
"'"What was that, then?"
"'"I'd had nearly a quarter of a million, hadn't I?"
"'"So it was said."
"'"But none was recovered, eh?"
"'"No."
"'"Well, where d'ye suppose the balance is?" he asked.
"'"I have no idea," said I.
"'"Right between my finger and thumb," he cried. "By God! I've go
more pounds to my name than you've hairs on your head. And if you've
money, my son, and know how to handle it and spread it, you can do
anything. Now, you don't think it likely that a man who could do
anything is going to wear his breeches out sitting in the stinking
hold of a rat-gutted, beetle-ridden, mouldy old coffin of a Chin
China coaster. No, sir, such a man will look after himself and will
look after his chums. You may lay to that! You hold on to him, and
you may kiss the book that he'll haul you through."
"'That was his style of talk, and at first I thought it meant
nothing; but after a while, when he had tested me and sworn me in
with all possible solemnity, he let me understand that there really
was a plot to gain command of the vessel. A dozen of the prisoners
had hatched it before they came aboard, Prendergast was the leader,
and his money was the motive power.
"'"I'd a partner," said he, "a rare good man, as true as a stock to a
barrel. He's got the dibbs, he has, and where do you think he is at
this moment? Why, he's the chaplain of this ship--the chaplain, no
less! He came aboard with a black coat, and his papers right, and
money enough in his box to buy the thing right up from keel to
main-truck. The crew are his, body and soul. He could buy 'em at so
much a gross with a cash discount, and he did it before ever they
signed on. He's got two of the warders and Mereer, the second mate,
and he'd get the captain himself, if he thought him worth it."
"'"What are we to do, then?" I asked.
"'"What do you think?" said he. "We'll make the coats of some of
these soldiers redder than ever the tailor did."
"'"But they are armed," said I.
"'"And so shall we be, my boy. There's a brace of pistols for every
mother's son of us, and if we can't carry this ship, with the crew at
our back, it's time we were all sent to a young misses'
boarding-school. You speak to your mate upon the left to-night, and
see if he is to be trusted."
"'I did so, and found my other neighbor to be a young fellow in much
the same position as myself, whose crime had been forgery. His name
was Evans, but he afterwards changed it, like myself, and he is now a
rich and prosperous man in the south of England. He was ready enough
to join the conspiracy, as the only means of saving ourselves, and
before we had crossed the Bay there were only two of the prisoners
who were not in the secret. One of these was of weak mind, and we did
not dare to trust him, and the other was suffering from jaundice, and
could not be of any use to us.
"'From the beginning there was really nothing to prevent us from
taking possession of the ship. The crew were a set of ruffians,
specially picked for the job. The sham chaplain came into our cells
to exhort us, carrying a black bag, supposed to be full of tracts,
and so often did he come that by the third day we had each stowed
away at the foot of our beds a file, a brace of pistols, a pound of
powder, and twenty slugs. Two of the warders were agents of
