The magistrate quickly arose.
“What is it, gentlemen? What do you want?” he asked.
“The cipher! the cipher!” exclaimed Benito, mad with grief—“the cipher of the document.”
“Do you know it, then?” shouted the judge.
“No, sir,” said Manoel. “But you?”
“Nothing! nothing!”
“Nothing?” gasped Benito, and in a paroxysm of despair he took a knife from his belt and would have plunged it into his breast had not the judge and Manoel jumped forward and managed to disarm him.
“Benito,” said Jarriquez, ina voice which he tried to keep calm, “if you father cannot escape the expiation of a crime which is not his, you could do something better than kill yourself.”
“What?” said Benito.
“Try and save his life!”
“How?”
“That is for you to discover,” answered the magistrate, “and not for me to say.”
