“Very likely,” he said, “very likely I have caught the fever: in which case they’ll never know at home what became of me: no one will ever know, except the Indians who will bury me here.”
“I’m going to look in those boxes,” he said, turning out of his hammock. “Perhaps there is some map or chart, if Wigmore was a prospector. With a map I might be able to find out where I am and how to get away from here.”
He pulled out the nearer of the two tin boxes from its covering of creeper. It felt and proved to be empty save for two small studs and a trouser button. He tipped the box on its side, to make sure that there was no label or address. “No further help there,” he said. “Now for the other.”
The second box had been used to block a hole which the dogs had routed in the hut wall. It had been weighted inside with a biggish hewn stone, so that the dogs should not thrust it aside. Beside the stone were some scraps of rubbish which Hi brought out to the light to examine. The things were:
A buckle of a strap.
Two halves of a lead pencil which had fallen apart.
The lead of the pencil.
A mouldy piece of knotted ribbon, which looked as if it had once gone round a packet of letters.
Two sodden letters in envelopes, both post-marked Shepton Mallet, the one on February 1st, the other February 8th, 1886, and addressed, “Dudley Wigmore, Esq., c/o The United Sugar Company, Santa Barbara.” One of these letters was signed “from mother”: the other was from “your loving May.”
Last of all was a much-weathered, ant-eaten pocket-book, sodden with damp and so clutched together by a rubber band as to be liker a piece of mouldy wood than a book.