"Enough," struck in Cooper-Nassington in his most terrible tones. "You, Glynn, have now justified yourself. It's the hunchback's turn. Once again I demand of him: What has he deciphered from those three queer-looking manuscripts which he purchased this afternoon?" Peter Zouche faltered; to my astonishment I saw that he had been conquered. "You know well enough what they contain," he snarled, "or you would not be here at this hour, and in this mood!" "And so do you, you wicked old cripple," roared my friend, "or you would never have spent all that money on packing that auction mart with your gang of foreign mercenaries to effect a knock-out of the manuscripts; you are not the kind of philanthropist who throws away two or three thousand pounds on the relatives of a poor Spanish priest whom you have never set eyes on. So speak out without any more fuss. Are they what I have been led to expect?" "They are," the hunchback muttered, licking his dry and feverish lips; "but it will take me two or three weeks to decode them. I was looking at them when you came and knocked at the door with that cursed all-compelling signal of yours. Why the deuce didn't you leave me in peace for a time?" "Because I wanted to be sure I had been correctly informed, of course," retorted the Member of Parliament gaily, rising and brushing the cigar ash off his waistcoat. "In fact, in a word, I shall assume now that you have got possession of the documents that give the key to the position and the drainage of the Lake of Sacred Treasure in Tangikano, which was for centuries the depository of the treasures of the original tribes of Mexico, and which has been believed always, upon quite credible evidence, to contain gold and precious stones to the amount of many millions sterling." "Yes; that is so," conceded Zouche, with a sigh. "What!" I cried, unable to stifle my excitement at hearing this extraordinary piece of news. "Do you mean to say there has been discovered at last that wonderful Mexican lake over which England nearly went to war with Spain in the days of Elizabeth, a secret that was supposed to be known only to the Jesuits, who lost in some miraculous fashion all the documents bearing on the subject nearly three hundred years ago?" "I do," replied the hunchback. "What did you think when I took such extraordinary precautions at the auction this afternoon?--that I was simply playing up for some quaint and curious cryptogram? Bah! men of my reputation don't fling one thousand eight hundred pounds about for childish puzzles like those." "So I might have guessed," I added to myself a little bitterly. "I ought to have realised something of the sort was afoot, but, as you know, we collectors of manuscripts have known so long about these wonderful missing records that we have actually grown tired of looking out for them, and some of the best and wisest of us have gone so far as to doubt their very existence."