Fragoso did not reply.

"Come, leave me alone! leave me alone!" shouted Jarriquez, and, a prey
to an outburst of rage, he grasped the document to tear it to atoms.

Fragoso seized his hands and stopped him. "The truth is there!" he said.

"I know," answered Jarriquez; "but it is a truth which will never see
the light!"

"It will appear--it must! it must!"

"Once more, have you the cipher?"

"No," replied Fragoso; "but, I repeat, Torres has not lied. One of his
companions, with whom he was very intimate, died a few months ago, and
there can be no doubt but that this man gave him the document he came to
sell to Joam Dacosta."

"No," answered Jarriquez--"no, there is no doubt about it--as far as
we are concerned; but that is not enough for those who dispose of the
doomed man's life. Leave me!"

Fragoso, repulsed, would not quit the spot. Again he threw himself at
the judge's feet. "Joam Dacosta is innocent!" he cried; "you will not
leave him to die? It was not he who committed the crime of Tijuco; it
was the comrade of Torres, the author of that document! It was Ortega!"

As he uttered the name the judge bounded backward. A kind of calm
swiftly succeeded to the tempest which raged within him. He dropped the
document from his clenched hand, smoothed it out on the table, sat down,
and, passing his hand over his eyes--"That name?" he said--"Ortega? Let
us see," and then he proceeded with the new name brought back by Fragoso
as he had done with the other names so vainly tried by himself.

After placing it above the first six letters of the paragraph he
obtained the following formula:

O r t e g a
_P h y j s l_

"Nothing!" he said. "That give us--nothing!"

And in fact the _h_ placed under the _r_ could not be expressed by a
cipher, for, in alphabetical order, this letter occupies an earlier
position to that of the _r._

The _p,_ the _y,_ the _j,_ arranged beneath the letters _o, t, e,_
disclosed the cipher 1, 4, 5, but as for the _s_ and the _l_ at the end
of the word, the interval which separated them from the _g_ and the _a_
was a dozen letters, and hence impossible to express by a single cipher,
so that they corresponded to neither _g_ nor _a_.

And here appalling shouts arose in the streets; they were the cries of
despair.

Fragoso jumped to one of the windows, and opened it before the judge
could hinder him.

The people filled the road. The h