It was then that they were joined by the Spaniard, Vasco, and Joshua Trust, who came together from the darkness of the thickets into the full light of the moon. And when they saw me, they also were afraid; for I still wore the helmet on my head and stood at no great distance from the open grave.
Forsyth explained the situation in a few words, with many a wave of the hand, as if he introduced us. Baverstock, in the meantime, was rapidly becoming his normal self. He seemed to have forgotten, for the time being, the very object of his journey.
"There's some mischief here!" on a sudden he exclaimed. "Rushby told us we would find the map beneath the helmet of the Spaniard."
At this, Forsyth laughed, and pointed straight at me.
"And since our Hannibal," he observed, "wears such a headgear somewhat out of fashion, we may safely presume that he could tell us where the map is, if he had the power to make us understand--which, for myself, I doubt."
The truth then dawned upon me on the instant. Mr. Gilbert Forsyth, for all his cleverness and calmness, was as fully in the wrong as Amos Baverstock had been; for he believed me to be a savage, whereas the other had taken me for a ghost, the awful apparition of a bygone Spanish soldier. If I had refused to speak before from sheer pigheadedness, I was now resolved to play the part that I was cast for, putting my trust in Providence and fortified by resolution. Though they burnt my flesh with red-hot irons, I was determined I would never speak.
They questioned me in every barbarous language that they knew. Vasco and Amos himself were my inquisitors, for Trust was no scholar, and Forsyth's learning went no further than the dead classic tongues, and, I believe, a little French. But I just gaped at them like a fool, and at last they gave it up as a bad business; and Amos, by now well convinced that I was human, struck me a cowardly blow across the mouth.
They looked in the Tomb; they searched everywhere for the map. They made a great fire of brushwood that they might see the better, and neglected no possible hiding-place where that little strip of parchment might be hidden. They looked inside my quiver, and even in the hollow of my blow-pipe. And then, at length, quite late at night, they gave it up. And in an ill mood they were, especially Trust and Amos.
They must have thought, however, that I was likely to be of some use to them, for they bound me hand and foot before I was permitted to lie down to rest. They were evidently not disposed to set me free, until they had solved the riddle I presented. They were altogether at a loss to explain who I was or why--apparently of my own free will--I had gone down into that grim and ancient vault. I think, even then, they connected me in some way or other with Bannister himself.
Left alone, I was given time to think, and I lay awake that night for many hours, wondering what would happen.