asking me to bring it in The Diver from Malta.  It was what you’d call a coincidence, I reckon,” added Hervey lazily; “but I did cry small when I heard the Professor here had paid nine hundred for a thing I’d let slip for two hundred.  Had I known of those infernal emeralds, I’d have ripped open the case on board and would have recouped myself.  But I knew nothing, and Bolton never told me.”

“How could he,” asked Braddock quietly, “when he did not know that any jewels were buried with the dead?  I did not know either.  And I have explained why I wanted the mummy.  But it never struck me until I hear what you say now, that this mummy,” he nodded towards the green case, “was the one which you had stolen at Lima from De Gayangos.  But you must do me the justice, Captain Hervey, to tell Don Pedro that I never countenanced the theft.”

“No! you were square enough, I guess.  The sin is on my own blessed shoulders, and I don’t ask it to be shifted.”

“What did you do with the copy of the manuscript?” asked Don Pedro.

Hervey ruminated.

“I can’t think,” he mused.  “I found a screed of Latin along with the mummy, when I looted it from your Lima house, but it dropped out of my mind as to what became of it.  Maybe I passed it along to the Paris man, and he sold it along with the corpse to the Maltese gent.”

“But I tell you this copy was found in Sir Frank’s room,” insisted De Gayangos.  “How did it come to be there?”

Captain Hervey rose and took a turn up and down the room.  When Cockatoo came in his way he calmly kicked him aside.

“What do you think, Mr. Hope?” he asked, coming to a full stop before Archie, while Cockatoo crept away with a very dark scowl.

“I don’t know what to think,” replied that young gentleman promptly, “save that Sir Frank is my very good friend, and that I take his word that he knows nothing of how the manuscript came to be hidden in his bookcase.”

“Huh!” said Hervey scornfully, and took another turn up and down the room in silence.  “I surmise that your friend isn’t a white man.”

Hope leaped to his feet.

“That’s a lie,” he said distinctly.

“I’d have shot you for that down Chili way,” snapped the skipper.

“Possibly,” retorted the artist dryly, “but I happen to be handy with my revolver also.  I say again that you lie.  Random is not the man to commit so foul a crime.”

“Then how did the manuscript get into his room?” questioned Hervey.

“He is trying to learn, and, when he does, will come here to let us all know, Captain Hervey.  But I ask you on what grounds you accuse him?  Oh I know all you said to-day,” added Hope scornfully, waving his hand; “but you can’t prove that Random got the manuscript.”

“If it’s in his room, as you acknowledge, I can,” said Hervey, speaking in a much more cultivated tone.  “See here.  As I said before, that copy must have been passed along with the corpse to the Maltese man.  Well, then, the Professor here bought the corpse, and with it the manuscript.”