The conclusion of my story shall be very short. What was the connection
between Gumbo and the spoils of the Sachem's Mound, and how did the
treasures of the Aztec Temple of the Sun come to be concealed in the
burial place of the Red Man? All this Moore explained to me the day
after we secured the treasures.
"My father," said Moore, "was, as you know, a great antiquarian, and a
great collector of Mexican and native relics. He had given almost as
much time as Brasseur de Bourbourg to Mexican hieroglyphics, and
naturally had made nothing out of them. His chief desire was to discover
the Secret of the Pyramid--not the pyramids of Egypt, as you fancied, but
the Pyramid of the Sun, Tonatiuh, at Teohuacan. To the problem connected
with this mysterious structure, infinitely older than the empire of
Montezuma, which Cortes destroyed, he fancied he had a clue in this
scroll."
Moore handed me a prepared sheet of birch bark, like those which the red
men use for their rude picture writings. It was very old, but the
painted characters were still brilliant, and even a tyro could see that
they were not Indian, but of the ancient Mexican description. In the
upper left-hand corner was painted a pyramidal structure, above which the
sun beamed. Eight men, over whose heads the moon was drawn, were issuing
from the pyramid; the two foremost bore in their hands effigies of the
sun and moon; each of the others seemed to carry smaller objects with a
certain religious awe. Then came a singular chart, which one might
conjecture represented the wanderings of these men, bearing the sacred
things of their gods. In the lowest corner of the scroll they were being
received by human beings dressed unlike themselves, with head coverings
of feathers and carrying bows in their hands.
"This scroll," Moore went on, "my father bought from one of the last of
the red men who lingered on here, a prey to debt and whisky. My father
always associated the drawings with the treasures of Teohuacan, which,
according to him, must have been withdrawn from the pyramid, and conveyed
secretly to the north, the direction from which the old Toltec pyramid
builders originally came. In the north they would find no civilized
people like themselves, he said, but only the Indians. Probably,
however, the Indians would receive with respect the bearers of mysterious
images and rites, and my father concluded that the sacred treasures of
the Sun might still be concealed among some wandering tribe of red men.
He had come to this conclusion for some time, when I and my brother
returned from school, hastily summoned back, to find him extremely ill.
He had suffered from a paralytic stroke, and he scarcely recognized us.
But we made out, partly from his broken and wandering words, partly from
old Tom (Peter's father, now dead), that my father's illness had followed
on a violent fit of passion. He had picked up, it seems, from some
Indians a scroll which he considered of the utmost value, and which he
placed in a shelf of the library. Now, old Gumbo was a house-servant at
that time, and, dumb as he was, and stupid as he was, my father had
treated him with peculiar kindness. Unluckily Gumbo yielded to the
favourite illusion of all servants, white and black, male and female,
that anything they find in the library may be used to light a fire with.
One chilly day Gumbo lighted the fire with the newly purchased Indian
birch scroll. My father, when he heard of this performance, lost all
self-command. In his ordinary temper the most humane of men, he simply
raged at Gumbo. He would teach him, he said, to destroy his papers. And
it appeared, from what we could piece together (for old Tom was very
reticent and my father very incoherent), that he actually branded or
tattooed a copy of what Gumbo had burnt on the nigger's body!"
"But," I interrupted, "your father knew all the scroll had to tell him,
else he could not have copied it on Gumbo. So why was he in such a
rage?"
"You," said Moore, with some indignation, "are not a collector, and you
can't understand a collector's feelings. My father knew the contents of
the scroll, but what of that? The scroll was the first edition, the real
original, and Gumbo had destroyed it. Job would have lost his temper if
Job had been a collector. Let me go on. My brother and I both
conjectured that the scroll had some connection with the famous riches of
the Sun and the secret of the Pyramid of Teohuacan. Probably, we
thought, it had contained a chart (now transferred to Gumbo's frame) of
the hiding-place of the treasure. However, in the confusion caused by my
father's illness, death, and burial, Gumbo escaped, and, being an
unusually stupid nigger, he escaped due south-west. Here he seems to
have fallen into the hands of some slave-holding Indians, who used him
even worse than any white owners would have done, and left him the mere
fragment you saw. He filtered back here through the exchange of
commerce, 'the higgling of the market,' and as soon as I recognized him
at the sale I made up my mind to purchase him. So did my brother; but,
thanks to Peter and his hornets, I became Gumbo's owner. On examining
him, after he was well washed on the night of the attack, I found this
chart, as you may call it, branded on Gumbo's back." Here Moore made a
rapid tracing on a sheet of paper. "I concluded that the letters S M
(introduced by my father, of course, as the Indian scroll must have been
'before letters') referred to the Sachem's Mound, which is in my land;
that the Sun above referred to the treasures of the Sun, that S C stood
for the Sachem's Cave, and that the cave led, under the river, within the
mound. We might have opened the mound by digging on our own land, but it
would have been a long job, and must have attracted curiosity and brought
us into trouble. So, you see, the chart Gumbo destroyed was imprinted by
my father on his black back, and though he _knew_ nothing of the secret
he distinctly _had_ it."
"Yes," said I, "but why did you ask for a razor when you were left alone
with Gumbo?"
"Why," said Moore, "I knew Gumbo was marked somewhere and somehow, but
the place and manner I didn't know. And my father might have remembered
the dodge of Histiaeus in Herodotus: he might have shaved Gumbo's head,
tattooed the chart on that, and then allowed the natural covering to hide
the secret 'on the place where the wool ought to grow.'"