gn of them.

"If they only follow me up quickly, maybe they can overtake this craft,"
he said to himself, "although she's a fast one."

At this juncture of Rob's cogitations the door was thrust open and Gyp
entered with some food and water.

He placed them on the floor and started to leave the room in sullen
silence, when Rob stopped him.

"What are you going to do with me?" he demanded.

"Don't ask no questions and you'll get told no lies," growled the man,
slamming the door and relocking it on the outside.

"Well," thought Rob, "it's plain that I'm to be kept in the dark as to
my fate. Well, it's no use worrying. I'll tackle this food and take a
good long drink of water and then see if I can come to any conclusion."

The meal brightened Rob up wonderfully. After eating it he sat on the
edge of the bunk casting about for something to keep his mind off his
troubles, when he suddenly recollected the mysterious cipher found on
the _Good Hope_.

Reaching into his pocket he pulled it out and began figuring with the
stump of a pencil on the back of an old envelope. But ingenious as he
was, he found it hard to decipher. He tried half a dozen well-known
systems on it and was about to give up in despair when he recalled the
"Letter" method of reading cryptic numeral ciphers.

This system requires the operator to figure out the recurrence of
different numerals and the order in which they appear. Rob noticed that
the number 5 occurred most frequently. Now E is the most used letter in
any bit of English writing, so the lad set down 5 as answering for E.

After this he figured industriously till he had managed to make
something like sense out of the first paragraph of the old writing.

It would be wearisome to take the matter step by step in all its
details. Suffice it to say, therefore, that Rob found that he had hit on
a correct system and at the end of two hours had the following message
before him.

"It is buried twenty-four paces from dead cypress and to the west. The
island lies in long. 80 degrees 50 minutes and lat. 33 degrees 24
minutes. To whoever finds this and reads it, I will the ivory. Death is
close to me now. Good bye to all."

When his task had been completed, Rob sat gazing at the paper before
him. Unquestionably it gave the location of the dead whaler's cache. For
an instant the boy thought, with a thrill, that he was within reach of a
fortune. But the next moment he recalled where he was, which, i