ed to part with it until after his marriage with
Dacosta's daughter--that is to say, when it would have been impossible
to undo an accomplished fact.

All these views were held by some people in some form, and we can quite
understand what interest the affair created. In any case, the situation
of Joam Dacosta was most hazardous. If the document were not deciphered,
it would be just the same as if it did not exist; and if the secret of
the cryptogram were not miraculously divined or revealed before the end
of the three days, the supreme sentence would inevitably be suffered by
the doomed man of Tijuco. And this miracle a man attempted to perform!
The man was Jarriquez, and he now really set to work more in the
interest of Joam Dacosta than for the satisfaction of his analytical
faculties. A complete change had also taken place in his opinion. Was
not this man, who had voluntarily abandoned his retreat at Iquitos, who
had come at the risk of his life to demand his rehabilitation at the
hands of Brazilian justice, a moral enigma worth all the others put
together? And so the judge had resolved never to leave the document
until he had discovered the cipher. He set to work at it in a fury.
He ate no more; he slept no more! All his time was passed in inventing
combinations of numbers, in forging a key to force this lock!

This idea had taken possession of Judge Jarriquez's brain at the end
of the first day. Suppressed frenzy consumed him, and kept him in a
perpetual heat. His whole house trembled; his servants, black or white,
dared not come near him. Fortunately he was a bachelor; had there been
a Madame Jarriquez she would have had a very uncomfortable time of
it. Never had a problem so taken possession of this oddity, and he had
thoroughly made up his mind to get at the solution, even if his head
exploded like an overheated boiler under the tension of its vapor.

It was perfectly clear to the mind of the worthy magistrate that the key
to the document was a number, composed of two or more ciphers, but what
this number was all investigation seemed powerless to discover.

This was the enterprise on which Jarriquez, in quite a fury, was
engaged, and during this 28th of August he brought all his faculties to
bear on it, and worked away almost superhumanly.

To arrive at the number by chance, he said, was to lose himself in
millions of combinations, which would absorb the life of a first-rate
calculator. But if he could in no