“It will not be ‘Fordibras’ upon the high seas, nor will a whole alphabet of ‘A’s’ help us, Harry,” said I, as kindly as I could. “But that’s not your fault, my lad. Had you gone aboard with them, it would have been a different story. There is some password, I am sure, and it is used only for the ships. As it is, I must go wanting it—a hundred thousand pities, if pity is ever any use to anybody.”
“Then you never met one of their sailors, Doctor Fabos?”
“No, I never—Good God! what am I saying? Never met one of their sailors? Harry, what made you ask me that question?”
“You think of everything, sir. I made sure you would have been aboard one of their ships.”
“I have not been aboard one of their ships, but—well, we shall see. Who knows, Harry, but that you were to be the destiny of this? Go up to Captain Larry and tell him that I have news for him and for Mr. Benson. It may not be Europe after all.”
He went away as quietly as he had come and left me to the instruments. That which was in my mind I would share with none. Say that it was an idea which might win or lose all by a word and you will come near to its discovery. My purpose was to send by wireless telegraphy such a message to the Diamond Ship as would lead us to the discovery both of her present situation and her ultimate destination. To do this, I needed a password to the confidence of her commander. That password I believed that I possessed. It had been given to me years gone when a dead sailor had been washed ashore upon Palling beach, and one of the most famous diamonds in Europe had been found upon his body. Judge of my excitement when I sat down to put this idea to the proof. There before me was the instrument still ticking a message I could not decipher. I sat down before our own keyboard and deliberately rapped out the words, “Captain Three Fingers.” Again and again I sent the words speeding across the lonely seas. “Captain Three Fingers”—that, and nothing more. As a spirit winging a human thought it went, to the unknown, over the silent waters, a tremor of the air, a voice of doom, an awful, mysterious power of words pregnant of discovery or wholly impotent in the mocking ether.
An hour passed, and found me still alone. There had been no response to my message, no further agitation of the receiver whose message baffled me. Faithful to my wish, neither Larry nor McShanus had interrupted me. I could hear as a distant sound the murmur of gentle seas beating upon our bows. The purr of our engines was as that of a living, sentient entity, awake to the intervals of action. My fingers had grown weary of repeating those idle words. I sat back in my chair in a bitterness of spirit foreign to me, and reflected upon the fatuity of impulse and the mockery of all human deduction. If there were a password to the deck of the Diamond Ship, I lacked it. My hasty conclusions had met with their just fate. The men aboard the distant vessel had taken alarm and signalled to me no more. What would it profit them to continue this vain employment? Answer, that obstinacy prompted me. Doggedly, persistently, reason would repeat that I was right. The words were the only words. I could imagine no others. In mockery almost I changed my key, and to prove myself right, a hundred times I tapped out the word “Fordibras” upon the ready instrument. Once, twice, thrice—thus it went speeding into the aerial wastes, losing itself under the blue heavens, a delusion upon a delusion, the mocking jest of a man who had no resource but jest. And how are wonder and the sport of chance to be expressed when I say that the word was answered, immediately, clearly, beyond all question—in a message from the Diamond Ship and from those who commanded her.
I sat as one transfixed, my hands trembling with excitement, my ears intent as though open to the story of a miracle. Plain as the talk of a friend at my side came that memorable answer, “How is old Five A’s doing?” Leaping to the lad Harry’s story, I answered them in the Romany tongue—the first, perhaps, that any student of crime should begin to learn. And now it became no longer a question of the word. Their anxiety mastered them. They were telling me their secrets across the waste—those secrets I would have paid half my fortune to learn.
“We lie at 90° 15′ by 35° 15′ 15″. Where are you?”
I flashed back a false reply, two degrees northward of our true situation. Quick as the instrument would transmit the words, I added this intelligence: