IX. THE IRON BOX

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      “It’s heavy enough to have a tidy bunch of gold in it,” said Ronicky. “Let’s get her open. Did you bring a sledge hammer, Dawn?”

      The latter looked at him reproachfully.

      “Figure I’d come on a trip like this without getting a pack ready long before? Nope, Ronicky, I had my pack under my arm when I left the house on the run last night, and the things in the pack are a pick and a shovel and a chisel and an eight-pound sledge.”

      As he enunciated the last word Ronicky disappeared through the door. Hugh Dawn picked up the strong box and, carrying it outside, had braced it firmly, lock up, between two big stones ready for the hammering which was to open it. Ronicky came a moment later with the hammer.

      “Now,” Hugh cried, brandishing the hammer about his head, “look sharp!”

      He loosed a terrific blow which landed fairly and squarely upon the lock. But the hammer, after crunching through the rust, rebounded idly. The lock had not even been cracked. He whirled it again, again, and again. His back went up and down, and the sledge became a varying streak of light that struck against the box, always hitting accurately on one spot. Ronicky Doone looked on in amazement, and the girl’s eyes shone in delight at the prowess of her father, when there was a slight sound of cracking; at another blow the box flew open.

      Inside there were exposed a few scraps of paper, and nothing else!

      Ronicky Doone gasped with excitement. Was it true, then, that what the box was used for was to guard a secret and not money?

      Hugh Dawn, panting with labor and joy, gathered the paper fragments in trembling fingers.

      “Read ‘em, Jerry,” he said. “I—my eyes are all blurred. Where’s the map, first off?”

      There were three slips of paper, apparently fly leafs of books torn off, and the girl examined them.

      “There’s no map,” she said. “I’m sorry, dad.”

      “No map!” he shouted. “Let me see! Let me see!”

      He snatched them from her, glaring; then he crumpled the paper into a ball and cast it to the ground.

      “No wonder Cosslett died with a smile,” he groaned. “It was only a joke that he locked up in that box and threw away so careful. If ghosts walk the earth, he’s somewhere in the air now laughing at me.” He looked up as though he half expected to see the old face take form out of the empty atmosphere.

      “Nothing but a list of names and some figuring,” the girl said with a sigh. “I’m afraid it was only a jest.”

      Ronicky Doone alone had not seen the writing. He ran a few steps after the ball of paper as it rolled along in the breeze, picked it up, and smoothed out the separate bits. What he found was exactly what had been reported. First there were two slips covered with a list of names and dates:

      H. L. L.—September 22. Gregory—May 9. Scottie— August 14.

      The list continued, each separate name followed by dates ranging through two years until October of the second year. With this month the dates were crowded together. Half of the first slip and all of the second were covered with names and dates of that month. And last of all was the name “Hampden, October 19.”

      It struck a faint light in Ronicky’s groping imagination.

      “Hampden was the gent that run the affair for Cosslett, wasn’t he?” he asked.

      “What of it?”

      “Here’s his name the last of the lot.”

      “And what does that mean?” Hugh Dawn asked.

      Jerry Dawn came and peered with interest over the shoulder of Ronicky.

      “It goes to prove that we’re working on more than hearsay,” the girl said. “Goes to prove that there was really a connection between Cosslett and Hampden, and in that case, why, Cosslett is simply a murderous old miser who used other men to do killings so that he could get gold, and who then sat down with his Bible and thought about his ill-gotten gains.”

      “I knew all that before,” declared her father. “But this is a blank trail, Jerry. Cosslett’s gold will rest and rot. No man’ll ever find it— all them millions!”

      Ronicky turned to the third slip. It was a compact jumble of figures. He read as follows:

      (1, 1, 3, 2; 1, 1, 6, 5; 1, 1, 9, 1; 1, 1, 12, 5) (2, 9, 1, 13; 2, 9, 1, 4; 2, 9, 3, 6)

      So it ran on through line after line of bracketed numbers with commas and semicolons interspersed.

      Ronicky Doone dropped the paper to his side. “Dawn,” he said, “I figure that every word you’ve said is right, except where you begin to give up hope. But this mess of figures—I dunno what could have been in Cosslett’s head when he started to make it up. Anyway, it can’t do us any good.”

      He was about to throw the papers to the wind, but the girl stayed his hand.

      “Just a moment,” she said hastily, and, taking the slip which contained the figures, she perused it carefully.

      Ronicky and her father anxiously turned toward her. Since both of them were convinced that the trail to the treasure began at the shack of Cosslett, and since there was no possible clue save that piece of paper and the list of numbers, they hoped against hope that Jerry could make something out of it.

      “If they’s any sense to it,” said her father, “Jerry’ll get at it. She always was a wonder at puzzles, even when she was no bigger’n a minute.”

      The girl raised her fine head, and now the gray eyes were glinting with excitement.

      “It’s a message of some kind written in a code,” she announced. There’s no doubt about that.”

      The two men crowded about her.

      “You see?” she pointed out. “There are thirteen of those bracketed groups. Inside the brackets the numbers are separated with commas and grouped with semicolons. I counted the groups set off by the semicolons, and altogether there are fifty-eight of them. Well, the average length of a word is about five letters. Five goes into fifty-eight eleven times and a little over. That’s near enough. Fifty-eight letters to make up eleven words. And those eleven words —since they were locked up so carefully in the strong box—may they not form the directions to the place where the treasure is buried? I admit that I don’t see how he could have written complete directions with so few words; but at least it gives us a new hope, doesn’t it?”

      The cheer from the two men was answer enough.

      “After all,” said Ronicky, “that leaves us almost as much in the dark as ever. See any way you can get at the code?”

      “I don’t know,” said the girl, shaking her head. “It looks hard. But then, most puzzles seem hard until you get at them, you know; and, once they’re deciphered, they seem so simple that everyone is surprised he didn’t see through the thing before. There are lots of ways of making up codes, of course. The oldest way is the worst. You simply substitute particular characters for the different letters. In that way you simply have a new alphabet.”

      “That sounds hard enough to suit me,” said her father,