Wausau pilot. [volume] (Wausau, Wis.) 1896-1940, 1905-09-19
THE DIAMOND RIVER
N~N~.00~~~S0@|
by DAVID MURRAY

of him. | shall die here, Harvey: | shall
have to be in reach of the mountains
when my time comes. Wiley stuck on,
and he was very queer. He used to laugh
when he talked about it; but be told his
! tale about the river bed full of diamonds
to anybody who cared to hear it, and the
majority of people thought that on this
particular point his wits were turned.
well, now, old Zelkar comes upon
the scene. Zelkar, as l told you, was
a Hungarian Jew He had been in trou-
Bile with Kossuth ages ago, and he had
been in trouble with Mazzini, and he had
been in half the prisons of the Continent
for Matching treason of one sort or an
other, and at last. by some strange
chance, he drifted out to Brazil, and so
on until he lighted or Wiley. | knew
Zelkar in his late days, as | shall tell
you when l come to my own share in
the story. Outside his politics he had
only one interest in the world; it was
the royal game of chess. | do believe
that you might have lit slow fire under
old Zelkar when once he had fairly set
tied down to a game-he got so aston
ishingly absorbed. Wiley turned out a
sort of protector for him, and local
carpenter, who was clever at the lathe,
turned EN- out a set of chessmen and a
board; for there was nothing of that sort
to be bought nearer than Rio Janeiro,
and the two played together every day.
1t came out that Zelkar's great passion
was the making of chess problems, and
Wiley set him to work at it. All the
problems you have seen and worked at
were made by Zelkar, but the old man
was kept in ignorance of the purpose he
was working for. All he knew was that
his patron would say to him: L want you
to invent me a problem in which the
black king shall be forced to such and
such a square Zelkar thought this a
mere caprice, and since Wiley always
gave him a gold coin when he had tested
and approved the problem, it served his
turn so we'll that he would have asked
for nothing better all his life.
He was working two or three prob
lens week--it was no sort of task for
him. for he had perfect genius for the
work-and all on a sudden he made the
discovery that he was working on a plan.
He found one day in Wiley's room be-
tween the title page and the binding of
a big Bible a sheet of cartridge paper
marked out for a chess board, and each
of it's squares marked with a letter. The
whole alphabet was used up twice, and
as far again as was needed to cover ev-
cry square on the board. He had in his
pocketbook the roughly penciled notes of
his problems, and it occurred to him to
go over them. He found that the letters
on the successive squares on which the
black king stood in the problems as they
came in order spelled out words in rea-
sonable sequence. He took a note of the
board, for the letters were distributed all
about it at haphazard. And so it came
TO pass, as they used to say in old times,
that when all the problems were made
that Wiley wanted, old Zelkar had got
the whole inscription. Wiley, l ought to
tell you, professed to have brought a
score of the finest stones away with
him. but he lost them when he got maui
ed by the lion. The natives who rescued
him and took care of him had no idea of
their value, and left them behind.