Then, as though driven to desperation, she turned, looked into the glass case beside her for a few minutes, and then, fitting her key to the door, opened it, selected a volume at hazard, and composed herself to read.
For a while White watched her lazily, but presently with more interest, as her features gradually grew more animated and her attention seemed to be concentrated on the book.
As the minutes passed it became plain to White that the girl found the dingy little volume exceedingly interesting. And after a while she appeared to be completely absorbed in it; her blue eyes were rivetted on the pages; her face was flushed, her sensitive lips expressive of the emotion that seemed to be possessing her more and more.
White wondered what this book might be which she found so breathlessly interesting. It was[259] small, dingy, bound in warped covers of old leather, and anything but beautiful. And by and by he caught a glimpse of the title—"The Journal of Pedro Valdez."
The title, somehow, seemed to be familiar to him; he glanced into his own case, and after a few minutes' searching he caught sight of another copy of the same book, dingy, soiled, leather-bound, unlovely.
He looked over his private list until he found it. And this is what he read concerning it:
Valdez, Pedro—Journal of. Translated by Thomas Bangs, of Philadelphia, in 1760. With map. Two copies, much worn and damaged by water. Several pages missing from each book.
Pedro Valdez was a soldier of fortune serving with Cortez in Mexico and with De Soto in Florida. Nothing more is known of him, except that he perished somewhere in the semi-tropical forests of America.
Thomas Bangs, an Englishman, pretended to have discovered and translated the journal kept by Valdez. After the journal had been translated—if, indeed, such a document ever really existed—Bangs pretended that it was accidentally destroyed.
Bangs' translation and map are considered to be works of pure imagination. They were published from manuscript after the death of the author.
[260]
Bangs died in St. Augustine of yellow fever, about 1760-61, while preparing for an exploring expedition into the Florida wilderness.
Mildly edified, White glanced again at the girl across the aisle, and was surprised to see how her interest in the volume had altered her features. Tense, breathless, utterly absorbed in the book, she bent over the faded print, leaning close, for the sickly light that filtered through the glass roof scarcely illumined the yellow pages at all.
The curiosity of White was now aroused; he opened the glass case beside him, fished out his copy of the book, opened it, and began to read.
For the first few minutes his interest was anything but deep: he read the well-known pages where Bangs recounts how he discovered the journal of Valdez—and it sounded exceedingly fishy—a rather poorly written fairy-tale done by a man with little invention and less imagination, so worn out, hackneyed and trite were the incidents, so obvious the coincidences.