"His rescuers apparently did not bother to search him, or else, with the cunning of the crazed, Winters concealed from them his journal. If they had happened upon it, they would surely have appropriated it. Their dumping him off on Kim Chee was not so heartless as it sounds—the sick man was undoubtedly better off ashore in Hawaii than aboard a cruising whaler, and Kim Chee is famed for his charity from one end of the Pacific to the other.
"At breakfast that morning, I acquainted Ruth with the discovery, and read to her the passages I read to you. It was an exciting breakfast.
"We were waited upon by Ichi, the little Jap we shipped as cook in Hakodate. Polite, stupid, unfamiliar with the English language, we did not think it necessary to guard our speech against him. Indeed, we never gave him a thought, and we discussed my find pro and con very freely. We dwelt upon the value of the treasure, verified the Good Luck's reported loss by research, congratulated ourselves upon our knowledge of the position of Fire Mountain—all in the hearing of the self-effacing Ichi. We were only daunted by the prospect of searching blindly through that cave-riddled mountain. Then, Ruth found the code."
"Yes, it was pure luck," interposed Ruth. "I was examining the book, and I noticed a crack in the length of the cover. I looked more closely and discovered that the cover had been slit lengthwise, and that a piece of skin had been inserted."
"That is it—Exhibit A," said Little Billy. He pointed to the white strip on the table. "We recognized it instantly as the piece of parka lining Winters mentions using to write upon the secret of the cave. It is a piece of the skin of an unborn reindeer. The Kamchatka tribes line their fur garments with that skin, and Winters had evidently obtained his parka from them. The writing, you see, is all numerals."
Martin picked up and inspected the skin curiously. Unborn reindeer skin! He rubbed the glossy substance between his fingers. It felt uncanny to his touch, this relic of a long-past tragedy, this message from the world's end. And the message seemed to be no more than a faded jumble of figures. He read them carefully, searching in vain for some hint of meaning.
43344544536153314612151113236243361531153523113344
62315111464643441142123411421465224331454613115115
62635344244611313421446333442442361334423315426144
254613115115
[Transcriber's note: the first two rows of the above numbers in the source book had been defaced to the point of being almost unreadable. A best guess was made on some of them.]
"But how do you know this is a code?" Martin asked curiously.
"Three excellent reasons," said Little Billy. "First, John Winters mentions writing down the secret of the treasure's location, and we discover this skin; second, your genial former employer deciphered these figures for the affable Ichi; third, Ruth and I proved the correctness of the deciphering this morning.