“It looks very old,” she said.
“A really respectable antique, I fancy. Have you any pins—four, or more?”
She produced from a pocket a small hussif with its store of sewing accessories.
“A genie of the feminine order!” he cried. “I was merely hoping for a supply of those superfluous pins that used to lurk in my sister’s attire and only revealed their presence when I tried to reduce her to subjection.”
“Oh, you have a sister?”
“Yes—married—husband ranching in Montana.”
Meanwhile he was fastening the refractory document to the deck. With patience, helped by half a dozen pins, he managed to smooth it sufficiently to permit of detailed scrutiny. The girl, wholly interested now, knelt beside him. Any observer in a passing boat might have imagined that they were engaged in some profoundly devotional exercise. But the planks were hard. Miss Dane, seeing nothing but wrinkled parchment, yellow with age, and covered with strange scrawls that seemed to be more a part of the actual material than written on its surface, soon rose.
“Those hieroglyphics are beyond my ken,” she explained.
“They are Arabic,” said Warden—“Arabic characters, that is. The words are Latin—at least to some extent. Epistola Pauli Hebraicis has the ring of old Rome about it, even if it wears the garb of Mahomet.”