re no bones
broken; my hands were a mass of cuts and scratches, and my head was in
no better condition; but when we came to the right arm we found
something radically wrong at the shoulder, which had now become greatly
swollen, while as I sat on the edge of the bed the limb hung loosely
down in a way that caused us to think it was broken; at any rate it was
perfectly useless.

We consulted Dr. Ogilvie's book upon all kinds of accidents that bones
are heir to, and came to the conclusion that either my collar bone was
broken or displaced, or my arm was out of the socket at the shoulder.

Alec soon set to work, and ripped my coat and shirt off, and after a
deliberate diagnosis of my upper man, concluded that my shoulder was out
of joint and must be put in. Again my comrade wished to fire the big
gun for assistance, but I made up my mind to attempt my own cure with
his help, as I had seen several cases of a similar nature treated on the
hunting field.

My arm is a strong one, and I must draw a veil over the agony which
resulted from the clumsy way in which we hauled the poor limb about; but
we clicked the bone in at last, and then faint from pain I must have
gone off into a deep sleep, for the last I remember was feeling Alec
wipe the perspiration from my forehead as I fell back on my pillow in a
faint.

For days I kept my bed, as every part of my anatomy had received a
tremendous battering when I took my flight over the jagged stones that
barred my way.

My constant thought as I lay on the bed with the glorious sunshine
streaming in from the open window, which gave me a view of the dark
trees standing out against the azure sunlit sky, was about the
hieroglyphics on the paper. What did the skull portend, and what did the
letters and figures refer to?

The skull I set down as the point to which the most importance was to be
attached, and as I believed it referred to some hidden articles or
treasure stowed away more than a century ago, I was naturally very eager
to find out its whereabouts.

Well, say the skull represented the treasure spot, what did the square
surrounding it mean? I gave it up. "Then what," I asked myself, "is the
meaning of the letters at certain angles round the square both inside
and out?" These I assumed to be the bearings of certain objects, as the
person stood at the spot in which the goods were hidden; the figures I
conjectured were the number of feet or yards distant of the "treasure
spot"