“This is queer,” Hi said. “These letters have been opened and carried about in a man’s pocket. They are dated only about thirteen months ago. Yet that fellow said that Wigmore died a couple of years ago.” Either Wigmore was alive a year ago, or that tick opened his letters a year after he was dead. It isn’t likely that that fellow could have made a mistake about Wigmore’s death. He said ‘a couple of years.’ One could hardly go wrong on a point of that sort. One would remember when the only white man within twenty miles died.
“Then that fellow said, that Wigmore was a prospector, a pleasure-miner, and drank like a fish. Now it’s odd that there are none of the prospector’s things here: no pans and sieves for washing, no scales nor any stuff for making assays. Then if he drank like a fish, it is odd that there are no bottles left. It wouldn’t have been easy to drink like a fish out here; but if he drank at all he drank from bottles, and there are no bottles nor parts of bottles. Now father said that any forest Indian would work for a week for a bottle, which is a very valuable possession here. They make bottles into lamps, canteens, jewels, knives, scrapers and arrow-heads. There isn’t a trace of a bottle in this settlement, that I can see. So probably Wigmore didn’t drink like a fish. Probably also he wasn’t a prospector. Probably also he didn’t die a couple of years ago, but a year at most. This man has been lying about him. If he lied about his life, probably he has lied about his death. There has been a Wigmore here; that Wigmore is probably dead. The man who knows about his death has his gun and cartridges, and perhaps also his gold-claim and his mining things. The man who lies about him has profited by his disappearance. Supposing this man, whoever he is, this hundred yards Blue man, should have murdered Wigmore, in order to take his things?
“Who is this hundred yards Blue man? I’ll bet that name isn’t his real name, but a false name given to make me think that he is related to decent people. He is not a gentleman nor a man of ordinary decent feeling: he is a tick or criminal. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he has murdered Wigmore. If he thinks that I think that, he’ll probably murder me. I don’t think he’d think twice about murdering a chap. I’ll have to be jolly careful to-morrow. But, first, I’ll look at this book, to see if it will help at all.”
The book proved to be little better than pulp. It had been at one time a neat oblong pocket-book with a cover of black leather: now the dye in the cover and the endpapers had soaked through into the leaves, which were stuck together and stained like crushed blackberries. In the centre were two leaves which contained some legible jottings in pencil in a neat handwriting. They were seemingly columns of names. Closer examination shewed Hi that they were lists of words in different tongues. The left hand columns contained English words, the other columns were the Indian words in different dialects.
“It’s a vocabulary or dictionary. A polyglot Indian dictionary,” Hi said. “That explains what the man was. He was one of these men who write books about the Indians, and Indian grammars. This isn’t the hand of a man who goes pleasure-mining. This chap was a scholar. The only prospecting this fellow did was finding a new tribe with a different dialect.”
He had been standing bent over the book close to the door of the hut, where the glow of the bonfire lit his examination. Something told him suddenly that he was being observed. Looking up, to his left, to the point prompted to him, he saw Letcombe-Bassett standing at the mouth of another hut, three parts hidden, watching him. “The beast has been spying on me,” Hi thought, turning away. “He knows that I think things are a little fishy: he has been watching to see what I have been doing.”
The thought of being spied upon made him at first uneasy, then gay. “If it comes to spying,” he thought, “I’ll see if I cannot lead you a dance.”
He put the book on the shelf of the post for the night: then he turned into his hammock, thinking uneasy thoughts till he was almost asleep.
He was lying high up in his hammock, with his head propped by what sailors would have called the nettles. A faint noise at the mouth of his hut made him instantly alert: someone had crept stealthily thither, breathing anxiously.
“Yes? Who is there?” Hi called.