Leaning back in my chair, I cast my mind over the strange tale I had heard that night from Adams, the story, whispered in the fierce noonday heat of the calaboose of San Salvador, of the ship which had brought the solitary white man and his gold out of the Unknown to Cock Island, of the Unknown's death and of the message he had left so oddly behind him. And, lest anyone should think that I was paying too much heed to a rambling yarn told me at second-hand by a drunken outcast, a yarn, moreover, based on a statement by a Kanaka deck-hand, let me say that my whole training in the Intelligence had taught me never to reject any statement, however improbable it sounded, until it had failed to withstand an elaborate series of tests. Indeed, the major satisfaction of this poorly paid and sometimes dangerous profession of ours is the rare delight of seeing emerge out of some seemingly impossible tale a solid basis of fact.
And, behind the beach-comber's rambling story, there were certain solid facts which, from the moment of discovering that the message was in German, I could not afford to neglect. When William the Second launched the world war like a big stone dropped in a pond, the ripples reached to the uttermost ends of the earth. In many a lonely island of the Seven Seas there had been, I knew, mysterious comings and goings, connected with gun-running, submarine work and dark conspiracies of all kinds. Did this scrap of stained oilsilk, picked off a lonely grave in the Southern Seas, lead back to a secret adventure of this kind? I decided that it might.
I turned to the message again. It was obviously written by a German and for a German, it was fair to presume.... for some specific German, furthermore, who would hold the key to the conventional code in which this message was almost certainly written. Consequently, the solitary stranger of Cock Island had expected to meet a German on the island, ergo, the island was a meeting-place, some secret rendezvous of the busy German conspirators in the war. This was borne out by the remarkable evidence laid before Adams by Dutchey on their visit to Cock Island to prove that some gang of desperadoes from San Salvador had previously been there. The names mentioned by Dutchey were undoubtedly Spanish—Black Pablo and Neque, for instance—but there might have been Germans with them. El Cojo was also Spanish, to judge by the name; but apparently he had put in an appearance later and had not visited the island.
To what did the message refer? What would the solitary German, with the hand of Death at his throat, wish to tell the man whom he was to have met? Might it not be, as Adams had said, the whereabouts of the gold, brought to the island by the Unknown, which, from the observation of Adams' fellow prisoners at the calaboose, was apparently still on the island? Various geographical indications in the message—the Sugar-Loaf, the Lorelei (the latter the well-known crag on the Rhine) seemed to confirm this.
But the message had remained in its bottle on the grave until, months later, Adams and Dutchey had found it. It was, therefore, to be presumed that the unknown German's friend, probably someone in El Cojo's gang, had not kept the appointment. Why?
I stared in perplexity at the dead man's scrawl. Every one of my deductions, I perceived all too clearly, led to a question to which I was unable to supply an answer. I began to regret that I had not read the message at Adams' hut and cross-examined him on it before I left. But I realised I should never have been able to decipher the scrawl by the flickering light of the oil-lamp in the shack. I resolved to go down to the negro quarter and see Adams again in the morning.
I suddenly began to feel restless and rather unhappy. I knew the symptoms. In me they always presage a burst of activity after a spell of idleness. This infernal riddle had altogether upset me. I had no desire to go to bed; the very idea of sleep was repugnant to me.
I measured myself out a "peg" of whisky and splashed the soda into it. My eyes, roaming round the room, fell on the upright piano in the corner. I crossed to the instrument and opening the lid, put on the music rest the little square of oilskin. Then, summoning back to my mind with an effort the hazy musical knowledge of my early school days, with considerable deliberation I picked out on the piano the notes indicated in the four bars of music appended to the end of the message.
I got the melody at once, or rather one movement of a melody which was dimly familiar to me. It fitted itself to no words or voice in my mind; but as I hummed it over, a silly little jingle, I suddenly had a mental picture of a cheap German dance-hall such as you find in the northern part of Berlin, with a blaring orchestra and jostling couples redolent of perspiration and beer. I knew the tune; but it was, I thought, the words that were wanted to complete the dead man's message. And they came not.
I was laboriously pounding the piano with one finger when I heard Bard's heavy step on the verandah. The next moment he came into the room, a big figure of a man in a tussore silk suit with a panama hat. Somehow the sight of him made me feel easier in my mind. That sublime sense of superiority, which we British suck in with our mother milk, is a heartening thing when you find it in your fellow Britisher abroad, thousands of miles from home. And John Bard, though, with his small pointed beard and rather pallid face, he looked like a Spaniard, was through and through British. Trader, merchant, financier and, on occasion, statesman, his massive body bore scars which told of thrilling years spent among the cannibals and head-hunters of the Pacific islands.