"Because there was nothing in them of value, sir," replied the lad.

"What is in them?" said my father.

"Only old letters, sir, written to my father, when I was in Paris—nothing else."

"And who would know that?" said my father.

The boy went suddenly white.

"Precisely!" said my father. "You alone knew it, and when you undertook to give this library the appearance of a pillaged room, you unconsciously endowed your imaginary robber with the thing you knew yourself. Why search for loot in drawers that contained only old letters? So your imaginary robber reasoned, knowing what you knew. But a real robber, having no such knowledge, would have ransacked them lest he miss the things of value that he searched for."

He paused, his eyes on the lad, his voice deep and gentle.

"Where is the will?" he said.

The white in the boy's face changed to scarlet. He looked a moment about him in a sort of terror; then he lifted his head and put back his shoulders. He crossed the room to a bookcase, took down a volume, opened it and brought out a sheet of folded foolscap. He stood up and faced my father and the men about the room.

"This man," he said, indicating Gosford, "has no right to take all my father had. He persuaded my father and was trusted by him. But I did not trust him. My father saw this plan in a light that I did not see it, but I did not oppose him. If he wished to use his fortune to help our country in the thing which he thought he foresaw, I was willing for him to do it.

"But," he cried, "somebody deceived me, and I will not believe that it was my father. He told me all about this thing. I had not the health to fight for our country, when the time came, he said, and as he had no other son, our fortune must go to that purpose in our stead. But my father was just. He said that a portion would be set aside for me, and the remainder turned over to Mr. Gosford. But this will gives all to Mr. Gosford and leaves me nothing!"

Then he came forward and put the paper in my father's hand. There was silence except for the sharp voice of Mr. Gosford.

"I think there will be a criminal proceeding here!"

My father handed the paper to Lewis, who unfolded it and read it aloud. It directed the estate of Peyton Marshall to be sold, the sum of fifty thousand dollars paid to Anthony Gosford and the remainder to the son.

"But there will be no remainder," cried young Marshall. "My father's estate is worth precisely that sum. He valued it very carefully, item by item, and that is exactly the amount it came to."

"Nevertheless," said Lewis, "the will reads that way. It is in legal form, written in Marshall's hand, and signed with his signature, and sealed. Will you examine it, gentlemen? There can be no question of the writing or the signature."

My father took the paper and read it slowly, and old Gaeki nosed it over my father's arm, his eyes searching the structure of each word, while Mr. Gosford sat back comfortably in his chair like one elevated to a victory.

"It is in Marshall's hand and signature," said my father, and old Gaeki, nodded, wrinkling his face under his shaggy eyebrows. He went away still wagging his grizzled head, wrote a memorandum on an envelope from his pocket, and sat down in, his chair.

My father turned now to young Marshall.

"My boy," he said, "why do you say that some one has deceived you?"

"Because, sir," replied the lad, "my father was to leave me twenty thousand dollars. That was his plan. Thirty thousand dollars should be set aside for Mr. Gosford, and the remainder turned over to me."

"That would be thirty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, instead of fifty," said my father.

"Yes, sir," replied the boy; "that is the way my father said he would write his will. But it was not written that way. It is fifty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, and the remainder to me. If it were thirty thousand dollars to Mr. Gosford, as my father, said his will would be, that would have left me twenty thousand dollars from the estate; but giving Mr. Gosford fifty thousand dollars leaves me nothing."

"And so you adventured on a little larceny," sneered the Englishman.

The boy stood very straight and white.

"I do not understand this thing," he said, "but I do not believe that my father would deceive me. He never did deceive me in his life. I may have been a disappointment to him, but my father was a gentle man." His voice went up strong and clear. "And I refuse to believe that he would tell me one thing and do another!"

One could not fail to be impressed, or to believe that the boy spoke the truth.

"We are sorry," said Lewis, "but the will is valid and we cannot go behind it."

My father walked about the room, his face in reflection. Gosford sat at his ease, transcribing a note on his portfolio. Old Gaeki had gone back to his chair and to his little case of bottles; he got them up on his knees, as though he would be diverted by fingering the tools of his profession. Lewis was in plain distress, for he held the law and its disposition to be inviolable; the boy stood with a find defiance, ennobled by the trust in his father's honor. One could not take his stratagem for a criminal act; he was only a child, for all his twenty years of life. And yet Lewis saw the elements of crime, and he knew that Gosford was writing down the evidence.

It was my father who broke the silence.

"Gosford," he said, "what scheme were you and Marshall about?"

"You may wonder, sir," replied the Englishman, continuing to write at his notes; "I shall not tell you."

"But I will tell you," said the boy. "My father thought that the states in this republic could not hold together very much longer. He believed that the country would divide, and the South set up a separate government. He hoped this might come about without a war. He was in horror of a war. He had traveled; he had seen nations and read their history, and he knew what civil wars were. I have heard him say that men did not realize what they were talking when they urged war."

He paused and looked at Gosford.

"My father was convinced that the South would finally set up an independent government, but he hoped a war might not follow. He believed that if this new government were immediately recognized by Great Britain, the North would accept the inevitable and there would be no bloodshed. My father went to England with this scheme. He met Mr. Gosford somewhere—on the ship, I think. And Mr. Gosford succeeded in convincing my father that if he had a sum of money he could win over certain powerful persons in the English Government, and so pave the way to an immediate recognition of the Southern Republic by Great Britain. He followed my father home and hung about him, and so finally got his will. My father was careful; he wrote nothing; Mr. Gosford wrote nothing; there is no evidence of this plan; but my father told me, and it is true."

My father stopped by the table and lifted his great shoulders.

"And so," he said, "Peyton Marshall imagined a plan like that, and left its execution to a Mr. Gosford!"

The Englishman put down his pen and addressed my father.

"I would advise you, sir, to require a little proof for your conclusions. This is a very pretty story, but it is prefaced by an admission of no evidence, and it comes as a special pleading for a criminal act. Now, sir, if I chose, if the bequest required it, I could give a further explanation, with more substance; of moneys borrowed by the decedent in his travels and to be returned to me. But the will, sir, stands for itself, as Mr. Lewis will assure you."

Young Marshall looked anxiously at the lawyer.

"Is that the law, sir?"

"It is the law of Virginia," said Lewis, "that a will by a competent testator, drawn in form, requires no collateral explanation to support it."

My father seemed brought up in a cul-de-sac. His face was tense and disturbed. He stood by the table; and now, as by accident, he put out his hand and took up the Japanese crystal supported by the necks of the three bronze storks. He appeared unconscious of the act, for he was in deep reflection. Then, as though the weight in his hand drew his attention, he glanced at the thing. Something about it struck him, for his manner changed. He spread the will out on the table and began to move the crystal over it, his face close to the glass. Presently his hand stopped, and he stood stooped over, staring into the Oriental crystal, like those practicers of black art who predict events from what they pretend to see in these spheres of glass.

Mr. Gosford, sitting at his ease, in victory, regarded my father with a supercilious, ironical smile.

"Sir," he said, "are you, by chance, a fortuneteller?"

"A misfortune-teller," replied my father, his face still held above the crystal. "I see here a misfortune to Mr. Anthony Gosford. I predict, from what I see, that he will release this bequest of moneys to Peyton Marshall's son."

"Your prediction, sir," said Gosford, in a harder note, "is not likely to come true."

"Why, yes," replied my father, "it is certain to come true. I see it very clearly. Mr. Gosford will write out a release, under his hand and seal, and go quietly out of Virginia, and Peyton Marshall's son will take his entire estate."

"Sir," said the Englishman, now provoked into a temper, "do you enjoy this foolery?"

"You are not interested in crystal-gazing, Mr. Gosford," replied my father in a tranquil voice. "Well, I find it most diverting. Permit me to piece out your fortune, or rather your misfortune, Mr. Gosford! By chance you fell in with this dreamer Marshall, wormed into his confidence, pretended a relation to great men in England; followed and persuaded him until, in his ill-health, you got this will. You saw it written two years ago. When Marshall fell ill, you hurried here, learned from the dying man that the will remained and where it was. You made sure by pretending to write letters in this room, bringing your portfolio with ink and pen and a pad of paper. Then, at Marshall's death, you inquired of Lewis for legal measures to discover the dead man's will. And when you find the room ransacked, you run after the law."

My father paused.

"That is your past, Mr. Gosford. Now let me tell your future. I see you in joy at the recovered will. I see you pleased at your foresight in getting a direct bequest, and at the care you urged on Marshall to leave no evidence of his plan, lest the authorities discover it. For I see, Mr. Gosford, that it was your intention all along to keep this sum of money for your own use and pleasure. But alas, Mr. Gosford, it was not to be! I see you writing this release; and Mr. Gosford"—my father's voice went up full and strong,—"I see you writing it in terror—sweat on your face!"

"The Devil take your nonsense!" cried the Englishman.

My father stood up with a twisted, ironical smile.

"If you doubt my skill, Mr. Gosford, as a fortune, or rather a misfortune-teller I will ask Mr. Lewis and Herman Gaeki to tell me what they see."

The two men crossed the room and stooped over the paper, while my father held the crystal. The manner and the bearing of the men changed. They grew on the instant tense and fired with interest.

"I see it!" said the old doctor, with a queer foreign expletive.

"And I," cried Lewis, "see something more than Pendleton's vision. I see the penitentiary in the distance."

The Englishman sprang up with an oath and leaned across the table. Then he saw the thing.

My father's hand held the crystal above the figures of the bequest written in the body of the will. The focused lens of glass magnified to a great diameter, and under the vast enlargement a thing that would escape the eye stood out. The top curl of a figure 3 had been erased, and the bar of a 5 added. One could see the broken fibers of the paper on the outline of the curl, and the bar of the five lay across the top of the three and the top of the o behind it like a black lath tacked across two uprights.

The figure 3 had been changed to 5 so cunningly is to deceive the eye, but not to deceive the vast magnification of the crystal. The thing stood out big and crude like a carpenter's patch.

Gosford's face became expressionless like wood, his body rigid; then he stood up and faced the three men across the table.

"Quite so!" he said in his vacuous English voice. "Marshall wrote a 3 by inadvertence and changed it. He borrowed my penknife to erase the figure."

My father and Lewis gaped like men who see a penned-in beast slip out through an unimagined passage. There was silence. Then suddenly, in the strained stillness of the room, old Doctor Gaeki laughed.

Gosford lifted his long pink face, with its cropped beard bringing out the ugly mouth.

"Why do you laugh, my good man?" he said.

"I laugh," replied Gaeki, "because a figure 5 can have so many colors."

And now my father and Lewis were no less astonished than Mr. Gosford.

"Colors!" they said, for the changed figure in the will was black.

"Why, yes," replied the old man, "it is very pretty."

He reached across the table and drew over Mr. Gosford's memorandum beside the will.

"You are progressive, sir," he went on; "you write in iron-nutgall ink, just made, commercially, in this year of fifty-six by Mr. Stephens. But we write here as Marshall wrote in 'fifty-four, with logwood."

He turned and fumbled in his little case of bottles.

"I carry a bit of acid for my people's indigestions. It has other uses." He whipped out the stopper of his vial and dabbed Gosford's notes and Marshall's signature.

"See!" he cried. "Your writing is blue, Mr. Gosford, and Marshall's red!"

With an oath the trapped man struck at Gaeki's hand. The vial fell and cracked on the table. The hydrochloric acid spread out over Marshall's will. And under the chemical reagent the figure in the bequest of fifty thousand dollars changed beautifully; the bar of the 5 turned blue, and the remainder of it a deep purple-red like the body of the will.

"Gaeki," cried my father, "you have trapped a rogue!"

"And I have lost a measure of good acid," replied the old man. And he began to gather up the bits of his broken bottle from the table.



VIII. The Hole in the Mahogany Panel

Sir Henry paused a moment, his finger between the pages of the ancient diary.

"It is the inspirational quality in these cases," he said, "that impresses me. It is very nearly absent in our modern methods of criminal investigation. We depend now on a certain formal routine. I rarely find a man in the whole of Scotland Yard with a trace of intuitive impulse to lead him.... Observe how this old justice in Virginia bridged the gaps between his incidents."

He paused.

"We call it the inspirational instinct, in criminal investigation ... genius, is the right word."

He looked up at the clock.

"We have an hour, yet, before the opera will be worth hearing; listen to this final case."

The narrative of the diary follows:

The girl was walking in the road. Her frock was covered with dust. Her arms hung limp. Her face with the great eyes and the exquisite mouth was the chalk face of a ghost. She walked with the terrible stiffened celerity of a human creature when it is trapped and ruined.

Night was coming on. Behind the girl sat the great old house at the end of a long lane of ancient poplars.

This was a strange scene my father came on. He pulled up his big red-roan horse at the crossroads, where the long lane entered the turnpike, and looked at the stiff, tragic figure. He rode home from a sitting of the county justices, alone, at peace, on this midsummer night, and God sent this tragic thing to meet him.

He got down and stood under the crossroads signboard beside his horse.

The earth was dry; in dust. The dead grass and the dead leaves made a sere, yellow world. It looked like a land of unending summer, but a breath of chill came out of the hollows with the sunset.

The girl would have gone on, oblivious. But my father went down into the road and took her by the arm. She stopped when she saw who it was, and spoke in the dead, uninflected voice of a person in extremity.

"Is the thing a lie?" she said.

"What thing, child?" replied my father.

"The thing he told me!"

"Dillworth?" said my father. "Do you mean Hambleton Dillworth?"

The girl put out her free arm in a stiff, circling gesture. "In all the world," she said, "is there any other man who would have told me?"

My father's face hardened as if of metal. "What did he tell you?"

The girl spoke plainly, frankly, in her dead voice, without equivocation, with no choice of words to soften what she said:

"He said that my father was not dead; that I was the daughter of a thief; that what I believed about my father was all made up to save the family name; that the truth was my father robbed him, stole his best horse and left the country when I was a baby. He said I was a burden on him, a pensioner, a drone; and to go and seek my father."

And suddenly she broke into a flood of tears. Her face pressed against my father's shoulder. He took her up in his big arms and got into his saddle.

"My child," he said, "let us take Hambleton Dillworth at his word."

And he turned the horse into the lane toward the ancient house. The girl in my father's arms made no resistance. There was this dominating quality in the man that one trusted to him and followed behind him. She lay in his arms, the tears wetting her white face and the long lashes.

The moon came up, a great golden moon, shouldered over the rim of the world by the backs of the crooked elves. The horse and the two persons made a black, distorted shadow that jerked along as though it were a thing evil and persistent. Far off in the thickets of the hills an owl cried, eerie and weird like a creature in some bitter sorrow. The lane was deep with dust. The horse traveled with no sound, and the distorted black shadow followed, now blotted out by the heavy tree tops, and now only partly to be seen, but always there.

My father got down at the door and carried the girl up the steps and between the plaster pillars into the house. There was a hall paneled in white wood and with mahogany doors. He opened one of these doors and went in. The room he entered had been splendid in some ancient time. It was big; the pieces in it were exquisite; great mirrors and old portraits were on the wall.

A man sitting behind a table got up when my father entered. Four tallow candles, in ancient silver sticks, were on the table, and some sheets with figured accounts.

The man who got up was like some strange old child. He wore a number of little capes to hide his humped back, and his body, one thought, under his clothes was strapped together. He got on his feet nimbly like a spider, and they heard the click of a pistol lock as he whipped the weapon out of an open drawer, as though it were a habit thus always to keep a weapon at his hand to make him equal in stature with other men. Then he saw who it was and the double-barreled pistol slipped out of sight. He was startled and apprehensive, but he was not in fear.

He stood motionless behind the table, his head up, his eyes hard, his thin mouth closed like a trap and his long, dead black hair hanging on each side of his lank face over the huge, malformed ears. The man stood thus, unmoving, silent, with his twisted ironical smile, while my father put the girl into a chair and stood up behind it.

"Dillworth," said my father, "what do you mean by turning this child out of the house?"

The man looked steadily at the two persons before him.

"Pendleton," he said, and he spoke precisely, "I do not recognize the right of you, or any other man, to call my acts into account; however"—and he made a curious gesture with his extended hands "not at your command, but at my pleasure, I will tell you.

"This young woman had some estate from her mother at that lady's death. As her guardian I invested it by permission of the court's decree." He paused. "When the Maxwell lands were sold before the courthouse I bid them in for my ward. The judge confirmed this use of the guardian funds. It was done upon advice of counsel and within the letter of the law. Now it appears that Maxwell had only a life interest in these lands; Maxwell is dead, and one who has purchased the interest of his heirs sues in the courts for this estate.

"This new claimant will recover; since one who buys at a judicial sale, I find, buys under the doctrine of caveat emptor—that is to say, at his peril. He takes his chance upon the title. The court does not insure it. If it is defective he loses both the money and the lands. And so," he added, "my ward will have no income to support her, and I decline to assume that burden."

My father looked the hunchback in the face. "Who is the man bringing this suit at law?"

"A Mr. Henderson, I believe," replied Dillworth, "from Maryland."

"Do you know him?" said my father.

"I never heard of him," replied the hunchback.

The girl, huddled in the chair, interrupted. "I have seen letters," she said, "come in here with this man's return address at Baltimore written on the envelope."

The hunchback made an irrelevant gesture. "The man wrote—to inquire if I would buy his title. I declined." Then he turned to my father. "Pendleton," he said, "you know about this matter. You know that every step I took was legal. And with pains and care how I got an order out of chancery to make this purchase, and how careful I was to have this guardianship investment confirmed by the court. No affair was ever done so exactly within the law."

"Why were you so extremely careful?" said my father.

"Because I wanted the safeguard of the law about me at every step," replied the man.

"But why?"

"You ask me that, Pendleton?"' cried the man. "Is not the wisdom of my precautions evident? I took them to prevent this very thing; to protect myself when this thing should happen!"

"Then," said my father, "you knew it was going to happen."

The man's eyes slipped about a moment in his head. "I knew it was going to happen that I would be charged with all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors if there should be any hooks on which to hang them. Because a man locks his door is it proof that he knows a robber is on the way? Human foresight and the experience of men move prudent persons to a reasonable precaution in the conduct of affairs."

"And what is it," said my father, "that moves them to an excessive caution?"

The hunchback snapped his fingers with an exasperated gesture. "I will not be annoyed by your big, dominating manner!" he cried.

My father was not concerned by this defiance. "Dillworth," he said, "you sent this child out to seek her father. Well, she took the right road to find him."

The hunchback stepped back quickly, his face changed. He sat down in his chair and looked up at my father. There was here suddenly uncovered something that he had not looked for. And he talked to gain time.

"I have cast up the accounts in proper form," he said while he studied my father, his hand moving the figured sheets. "They are correct and settled before two commissioners in chancery. Taking out my commission as guardian, the amounts allowed me for the maintenance and education of the ward, and no dollar of this personal estate remains."

His long, thin hand with the nimble fingers turned the sheets over on the table as though to conclude that phase of the affair.

"The real property," he continued, "will return nothing; the purchase money was applied on Maxwell's debts and cannot be followed. This new claimant, Henderson, who has bought up the outstanding title, will take the land."

"For some trifling sum," said my father.

The hunchback nodded slowly, his eyes in a study of my father's face.

"Doubtless," he said, "it was not known that Maxwell had only a life estate in the lands, and the remainder to the heirs was likely purchased for some slight amount. The language of the deeds that Henderson exhibits in his suit shows a transfer of all claim or title, as though he bought a thing which the grantees thought lay with the uncertainties of a decree in chancery."

"I have seen the deeds," said my father.

"Then," said the hunchback, "you know they are valid, and transfer the title." He paused. "I have no doubt that Mr. Henderson assembled these outstanding interests at no great cost, but his conveyances are in form and legal."

"Everything connected with this affair," said my father, "is strangely legal!"

The hunchback considered my father through his narrow eyelids.

"It is a strange world," he said.

"It is," replied my father. "It is profoundly, inconceivably strange."

There was a moment of silence. The two men regarded each other across the half-length of the room. The girl sat in the chair. She had got back her courage. The big, forceful presence of my father, like the shadow of a great rock, was there behind her. She had the fine courage of her blood, and, after the first cruel shock of this affair, she faced the tragedies that might lie within it calmly.

Shadows lay along the walls of the great room, along the gilt frames of the portraits, the empty fireplace, the rosewood furniture of ancient make and the oak floor. Only the hunchback was in the light, behind the four candles on the table.

"It was strange," continued my father over the long pause, "that your father's will discovered at his death left his lands to you, and no acre to your brother David."

"Not strange," replied the hunchback, "when you consider what my brother David proved to be. My father knew him. What was hidden from us, what the world got no hint of, what the man was in the deep and secret places of his heart, my father knew. Was it strange, then, that he should leave the lands to me?"

"It was a will drawn by an old man in his senility, and under your control."

"Under my care," cried the hunchback. "I will plead guilty, if you like, to that. I honored my father. I was beside his bed with loving-kindness, while my brother went about the pleasures of his life."

"But the testament," said my father, "was in strange terms. It bequeathed the lands to you, with no mention of the personal property, as though these lands were all the estate your father had."

"And so they were," replied the hunchback calmly. "The lands had been stripped of horse and steer, and every personal item, and every dollar in hand or debt owing to my father before his death." The man paused and put the tips of his fingers together. "My father had given to my brother so much money from these sources, from time to time, that he justly left me the lands to make us even."

"Your father was senile and for five years in his bed. It was you, Dillworth, who cleaned the estate of everything but land."

"I conducted my father's business," said the hunchback, "for him, since he was ill. But I put the moneys from these sales into his hand and he gave them to my brother."

"I have never heard that your brother David got a dollar of this money."

The hunchback was undisturbed.

"It was a family matter and not likely to be known."

"I see it," said my father. "It was managed in your legal manner and with cunning foresight. You took the lands only in the will, leaving the impression to go out that your brother had already received his share in the personal estate by advancement. It was shrewdly done. But there remained one peril in it: If any personal property should appear under the law you would be required to share it equally with your brother David."

"Or rather," replied the hunchback calmly, "to state the thing correctly, my brother David would be required to share any discovered personal property with me." Then he added: "I gave my brother David a hundred dollars for his share in the folderol about the premises, and took possession of the house and lands."

"And after that," said my father, "what happened?"

The hunchback uttered a queerly inflected expletive, like a bitter laugh.

"After that," he answered, "we saw the real man in my brother David, as my father, old and dying, had so clearly seen it. After that he turned thief and fugitive."

At the words the girl in the chair before my father rose. She stood beside him, her lithe figure firm, her chin up, her hair spun darkness. The courage, the fine, open, defiant courage of the first women of the world, coming with the patriarchs out of Asia, was in her lifted face. My father moved as though he would stop the hunchback's cruel speech. But she put her fingers firmly on his arm.

"He has gone so far," she said, "let him go on to the end. Let him omit no word, let us hear every ugly thing the creature has to say."

Dillworth sat back in his chair at ease, with a supercilious smile. He passed the girl and addressed my father.

"You will recall the details of that robbery," he said in his complacent, piping voice. "My brother David had married a wife, like the guest invited in the Scriptures. A child was born. My brother lived with his wife's people in their house. One night he came to me to borrow money."

He paused and pointed his long index finger through the doorway and across the hall.

"It was in my father's room that I received him. It did not please me to put money into his hands. But I admonished him with wise counsel. He did not receive my words with a proper brotherly regard. He flared up in unmanageable anger. He damned me with reproaches, said I had stolen his inheritance, poisoned his father's mind against him and slipped into the house and lands. 'Pretentious and perfidious' is what he called me. I was firm and gentle. But he grew violent and a thing happened."

The man put up his hand and moved it along in the air above the table.

"There was a secretary beside the hearth in my father's room. It was an old piece with drawers below and glass doors above. These doors had not been opened for many years, for there was nothing on the shelves behind them—one could see that—except some rows of the little wooden boxes that indigo used to be sold in at the country stores."

The hunchback paused as though to get the details of his story precisely in relation.

"I sat at my father's table in the middle of the room. My brother David was a great, tall man, like Saul. In his anger, as he gesticulated by the hearth, his elbow crashed through the glass door of this secretary; the indigo boxes fell, burst open on the floor, and a hidden store of my father's money was revealed. The wooden boxes were full of gold pieces!"

He stopped and passed his fingers over his projecting chin.

"I was in fear, for I was alone in the house. Every negro was at a distant frolic. And I was justified in that fear. My brother leaped on me, struck me a stunning blow on the chest over the heart, gathered up the gold, took my horse and fled. At daybreak the negroes found me on the floor, unconscious. Then you came, Pendleton. The negroes had washed up the litter from the hearth where the indigo about the coins in the boxes had been shaken out."

My father interrupted:

"The negroes said the floor had been scrubbed when they found you."

"They were drunk," continued the hunchback with no concern. "And, does one hold a drunken negro to his fact? But you saw for yourself the wooden boxes, round, three inches high, with tin lids, and of a diameter to hold a stack of golden eagles, and you saw the indigo still sticking about the sides of these boxes where the coins had lain."

"I did," replied my father. "I observed it carefully, for I thought the gold pieces might turn up sometime, and the blue indigo stain might be on them when they first appeared."

Dillworth leaned far back in his chair, his legs tangled under him, his eyes on my father, in reflection. Finally he spoke.

"You are far-sighted," he said.

"Or God is," replied my father, and, stepping over to the table, he spun a gold piece on the polished surface of the mahogany board.

The hunchback watched the yellow disk turn and flit and wabble on its base and flutter down with its tingling reverberations.

"To-day, when I rode into the county seat to a sitting of the justices," continued my father, "the sheriff showed me some gold eagles that your man from Maryland, Mr. Henderson, had paid in on court costs. Look, Dillworth, there is one of them, and with your thumb nail on the milled edge you can scrape off the indigo!"

The hunchback looked at the spinning coin, but he did not touch it. His head, with its long, straight hair, swung a moment uncertain between his shoulders. Then, swiftly and with a firm grip, he took his resolution.

"The coins appear," he said. "My brother David must be in Baltimore behind this suit."

"He is not in Baltimore," said my father.

"Perhaps you know where he is," cried the hunchback, "since you speak with such authority."

"I do know where he is," said my father in his deep, level voice.

The hunchback got on his feet slowly beside his chair. And the girl came into the protection of my father's arm, her features white like plaster; but the fiber in her blood was good and she stood up to face the thing that might be coming. After the one long abandonment to tears in my father's saddle she had got herself in hand. She had gone, like the princes of the blood, through the fire, and the dross of weakness was burned out.

The hunchback got on his feet, in position like a duelist, his hard, bitter face turned slantwise toward my father.

"Then," he said, "if you know where David is you will take his daughter to him, if you please, and rid my house of the burden of her."

"We shall go to him," said my father slowly, "but he shall not return to us."

The hunchback's eyes blinked and bated in the candlelight.

"You quote the Scriptures," he said. "Is David in a grave?"

"He is not," replied my father.

The hunchback seemed to advance like a duelist who parries the first thrust of his opponent. But my father met him with an even voice.

"Dillworth," he said, "it was strange that no man ever saw your brother or the horse after the night he visited you in this house."

"It was dark," replied the man. "He rode from this door through the gap in the mountains into Maryland."

"He rode from this door," said my father slowly, "but not through the gap in the mountains into Maryland."

The hunchback began to twist his fingers.

"Where did he ride then? A man and a horse could not vanish."

"They did vanish," said my father.

"Now you utter fool talk!" cried Dillworth.

"I speak the living truth," replied my father. "Your brother David and your horse disappeared out of sound and hearing—disappeared out of the sight and knowledge of men—after he rode away from your door on that fatal night."

"Well," said the hunchback, "since my brother David rode away from my door—and you know that—I am free of obligation for him."

"It is Cain's speech!" replied my father.

The hunchback put back his long hair with a swift brush of the fingers across his forehead.

"Dillworth," cried my father, and his voice filled the empty places of the room, "is the mark there?"

The hunchback began to curse. He walked around my father and the girl, the hair about his lank jaws, his fingers working, his face evil. In his front and menace he was like a weasel that would attack some larger creature. And while he made the great turn of his circle my father, with his arm about the girl, stepped before the drawer of the table where the pistol lay.

"Dillworth," he said calmly, "I know where he is. And the mark you felt for just now ought to be there."

"Fool!" cried the hunchback. "If I killed him how could he ride away from the door?"

"It was a thing that puzzled me," replied my father, "when I stood in this house on the morning of your pretended robbery. I knew what had happened. But I thought it wiser to let the evil thing remain a mystery, rather than unearth it to foul your family name and connect this child in gossip for all her days with a crime."

"With a thief," snarled the man.

"With a greater criminal than a thief," replied My father. "I was not certain about this gold on that morning when you showed me the empty boxes. They were too few to hold gold enough for such a motive. I thought a quarrel and violent hot blood were behind the thing; and for that reason I have been silent. But now, when the coins turn up, I see that the thing was all ruthless, cold-blooded love of money.

"I know what happened in that room. When your brother David struck the old secretary with his elbow, and the dozen indigo boxes fell and burst open on the hearth, you thought a great hidden treasure was uncovered. You thought swiftly. You had got the land by undue influence on your senile father, and you did not have to share that with your brother David. But here was a treasure you must share; you saw it in a flash. You sat at your father's table in the room. Your brother stood by the wall looking at the hearth. And you acted then, on the moment, with the quickness of the Evil One. It was cunning in you to select the body over the heart as the place to receive the imagined blow—the head or face would require some evidential mark to affirm your word. And it was cunning to think of the unconscious, for in that part one could get up and scrub the hearth and lie down again to play it."

He paused.

"But the other thing you did in that room was not so clever. A picture was newly hung on the wall—I saw the white square on the opposite wall from which it had been taken. It hung at the height of a man's shoulders directly behind the spot where your brother must have stood after he struck the secretary, and it hung in this new spot to cover the crash of a bullet into the mahogany panel!"

My father stopped and caught up the hunchback's double-barreled pistol out of the empty drawer.

The room was now illumined; the moon had got above the tree tops and its light slanted in through the long windows. The hunchback saw the thing and he paused; his face worked in the fantastic light.

"Yes," continued my father, in his deep, quiet voice, "this is your mistake to-night—to let me get your weapon. Your mistake that other night was to shoot before you counted the money. It was only a few hundred dollars. The dozen wooden boxes would hold no great sum. But the thing was done, and you must cover it."

He paused.

"And you did cover it—with fiendish cunning. It would not do for your brother to vanish from your house, alone and with no motive. But if he disappeared, with the gold to take him and a horse to ride, the explanation would have solid feet to go on. I give you credit here for the ingenuity of Satan. You managed the thing. You caused your brother David and the horse to vanish. I saw, on that morning, the tracks of the horse where you led him from the stable to the door, and his tracks where you led him, holding the dead man in the saddle, from the door to the ancient orchard where the grass grows over the fallen-down chimney of your grandsire's house. And there, at your cunning, they wholly vanished."

The mad courage in the hunchback got control, and he began to advance on my father with no weapon and with no hope to win. His fingers crooked, his body in a bow, his wizen, cruel face pallid in the ghostly light.

"Dillworth," cried my father, in a great voice, like one who would startle a creature out of mania, "you will write a deed in your legal manner granting these lands to your brother's child. And after that"—his words were like the blows of a hammer on an anvil—"I will give you until daybreak to vanish out of our sight and hearing—through the gap in the mountains into Maryland on your horse, as you say your brother David went, or into the abandoned cistern in the ancient orchard where he lies under the horse that you shot and tumbled in on his murdered body!"

The moon was now above the gable of the house. The candles were burned down. They guttered around the sheet of foolscap wet with the scrawls and splashes of Dillworth's quill. My father stood at a window looking out, the girl in a flood of tears, relaxed and helpless, in the protection of his arm.

And far down the long turnpike, white like an expanded ribbon, the hunchback rode his great horse in a gallop, perched like a monkey, his knees doubled, his head bobbing, his loose body rolling in the saddle—while the black, distorted shadow that had followed my father into this tragic house went on before him like some infernal messenger convoying the rider to the Pit.



IX. The End of the Road

The man laughed.

It was a faint cynical murmur of a laugh. Its expression hardly disturbed the composition of his features.

"I fear, Lady Muriel," he said, "that your profession is ruined. Our friend—'over the water'—is no longer concerned about the affairs of England."

The woman fingered at her gloves, turning them back about the wrists. Her face was anxious and drawn.

"I am rather desperately in need of money," she said.

The cynicism deepened in the man's face.

"Unfortunately," he replied, "a supply of money cannot be influenced by the intensity of one's necessity for it."

He was a man indefinite in age. His oily black hair was brushed carefully back. His clothes were excellent, with a precise detail. Everything about him was conspicuously correct in the English fashion. But the man was not English. One could not say from what race he came. Among the races of Southern Europe he could hardly have been distinguished. There was a chameleon quality strongly dominant in the creature.

The woman looked up quickly, as in a strong aversion.

"What shall you do?" she said.

"I?"

The man glanced about the room. There was a certain display within the sweep of his vision. Some rugs of great value, vases and bronzes; genuine and of extreme age. He made a careless gesture with his hands.

"I shall explore some ruins in Syria, and perhaps the aqueduct which the French think carried a water supply to the Carthage of Hanno. It will be convenient to be beyond British inquiry for some years to come; and after all, I am an antiquarian, like Prosper Merimee."

Lady Muriel continued to finger her gloves. They had been cleaned and the cryptic marks of the shopkeeper were visible along the inner side of the wrist hem. This was, to the woman, the first subterfuge of decaying smartness. When a woman began to send her gloves to the laundry she was on her way down. Other evidences were not entirely lacking in the woman's dress, but they were not patent to the casual eye. Lady Muriel was still, to the observer, of the gay top current in the London world.

The woman followed the man's glance about the room.

"You must be rich, Hecklemeir," she said. "Lend me a hundred pounds."

The man laughed again in his queer chuckle.

"Ah, no, my Lady," he replied, "I do not lend." Then he added.

"If you have anything of value, bring it to me.... not information from the ministry, and not war plans; the trade in such commodities is ended."

It was the woman's turn to laugh.

"The shopkeepers in Oxford Street have been before you, Baron.. .. I've nothing to sell."

Hecklemeir smiled, kneading his pudgy hands.

"It will be hard to borrow," he said. "Money is very dear to the Britisher just now—right against his heart.... Still.... perhaps one's family could be thumb screwed......An elderly relative with no children would be the most favorable, I think. Have you got such a relative concealed somewhere in a nook of London? Think about it. If you could recall one, he would be like a buried nut."

The man paused; then he added, with the offensive chuckling laugh:

"Go to such an one, Lady Muriel. Who shall turn aside from virtue in distress? Perhaps, in the whole of London, I alone have the brutality—shall we call it—to resist that spectacle."

The woman rose. Her face was now flushed and angry.

"I do not know of any form of brutality in which you do not excel, Hecklemeir," she said. "I have a notion to, go to Scotland Yard with the whole story of your secret traffic."

The man continued to smile.

"Alas, my Lady," he replied, "we are coupled together. Scotland Yard would hardly separate us.... you could scarcely manage to drown me and, keep afloat yourself. Dismiss the notion; it is from the pit."

There was no virtue in her threat as the woman knew. Already her mind was on the way that Hecklemeir had ironically suggested—an elderly relative, with no children, from whom one might borrow,—she valued the ramifications of her family, running out to the remote, withered branches of that noble tree. She appraised the individuals and rejected them.

Finally her searching paused.

There was her father's brother who had gone in for science—deciding against the army and the church—Professor Bramwell Winton, the biologist. He lived somewhere toward Covent Garden.

She had not thought of him for years. Occasionally his name appeared in some note issued by the museum, or a college at Oxford.

For almost four years she had been relieved of this thought about one's family. The one "over the water" for whom Hecklemeir had stolen the Scottish toast to designate, had paid lavishly for what she could find out.

She had been richly, for these four years, in funds.

The habit was established of dipping her hand into the dish. And now to find the dish empty appalled her. She could not believe that it was empty. She had come again, and again to this apartment above the shops in Regent Street, selected for its safety of ingress; a modiste and a hairdresser on either side of a narrow flight of steps.

A carriage could stop here; one could be seen here.

Even on the right, above, at the landing of the flight of steps Nance Coleen altered evening gowns with the skill of one altering the plumage of the angels. It must have cost the one "over the water" a pretty penny to keep this whole establishment running through four years of war.

She spoke finally.

"Have you a directory of London, Hecklemeir?"

The man had been watching her closely.

"If it is Scotland Yard, my Lady," he said, "you will not require a direction. I can give you the address. It is on the Embankment, near..."

"Don't be a fool, Hecklemeir," she interrupted, and taking the book from his hands, she whipped through the pages, got the address she sought, and went out onto the narrow landing and down the steps into Regent Street:

She took a hansom.

With some concern she examined the contents of her purse. There was a guinea, a half crown and some shillings in it—the dust of the bin. And her profession, as Hecklemeir had said, was ended.

She leaned over, like a man, resting her arms on the closed doors.

The future looked troublous. Money was the blood current in the life she knew. It was the vital element. It must be got.

And thus far she had been lucky.

Even in this necessity Bramwell Winton had emerged, when she could not think of any one. He would not have much. These scientific creatures never accumulated money, but he would have a hundred pounds. He had no wife or children to scatter the shillings of his income.

True these creatures spent a good deal on the absurd rubbish of their hobbies. But they got money sometimes, not by thrift but by a sort of chance. Had not one of them, Sir Isaac Martin, found the lost mines from which the ancient civilization of Syria drew its supply of copper. And Hector Bartlett, little more than a mummy in the Museum, had gone one fine day into Asia and dug up the gold plates that had roofed a temple of the Sun.

He had been shown in the drawing rooms, on his return, and she had stopped a moment to look him over—he was a sort of mummy. She was not hoping to find Bramwell Winton one of these elect. But he was a hive that had not been plundered.

She reflected, sitting bent forward in the hansom, her face determined and unchanging. She did not undertake to go forward beyond the hundred pounds. Something would turn up. She was lucky... others had gone to the tower; gone before the firing squad for lesser activities in what Hecklemeir called her profession, but she had floated through... carrying what she gleaned to the paymaster. Was it skill, or was she a child of Fortune?

And like every gambler, like every adventurer in a life of hazard, she determined for the favorite of some immense Fatality.

It was an old house she came to, built in the prehistoric age of London, with thick, heavy walls, one of a row, deadly in its monotony. The row was only partly tenanted.

She dismissed the hansom and got out.

It was a moment before she found the number. The houses adjoining on either side were empty, the windows were shuttered. One might have considered the middle house with the two, for its step was unscrubbed, and it presented unwashed windows.

It was a heavy, deep-walled structure like a monument. Even the street in the vicinity was empty. If the biologist had been seeking an undisturbed quarter of London, he had, beyond doubt, found it here.

There was a bridged-over court before the house. Lady Muriel crossed. She paused before the door. There had been a bell pull in the wall, but the brass handle was broken and only the wire remained.

She was uncertain whether one was supposed to pull this wire, and in the hesitation she took hold of the door latch. To her surprise the door yielded, and following the impulse of her extended hand, she went in.

The hall was empty. There was no servant to be seen. And immediately the domestic arrangement of the biologist were clear to her. They would be that of one who had a cleaning woman in on certain days, and so lived alone. She was not encouraged by this economy, and yet such a custom in a man like Bramwell Winton might be habit.

The scientist, in the popular conception, was not concerned with the luxury of life—they were a rum lot.

But the house was not empty. A smart hat and stick were in the rack and from what should be a drawing room, above, there descended faintly the sound of voices.

It seemed ridiculous to Lady Muriel to go out and struggle with the broken bell wire. She would go up, now that she had entered, and announce herself, since, in any event, it must come to that.

The heavy oak door closed without a sound, as it had opened. Lady Muriel went up the stairway. She had nothing to put down. The only thing she carried was a purse, and lest it should appear suggestive—as of one coming with his empty wallet in his hand—she tucked the gold mesh into the bosom of her jacket.

The door to the drawing room was partly open, and as Lady Muriel approached the top of the stair she heard the voices of two men in an eager colloquy; a smart English accent from the world that she was so desperately endeavoring to remain in, and a voice that paused and was unhurried. But they were both eager, as I have written, as though commonly impulsed by an unusual concern.

And now that she was near, Lady Muriel realized that the conversation was not low or under uttered. The smart voice was, in fact, loud and incisive. It was the heavy house that reduced the sounds. In fact, the conversation was keyed up. The two men were excited about something.

A sentence arrested the woman's advancing feet.

"My word! Bramwell, if some one should go there and bring the things out, he would make a fortune, and would be famous. Nobody ever believed these stories."

"There was Le Petit, Sir Godfrey," replied the deliberate voice. "He declared over his signature that he had seen them."

"But who believed Le Petit," continued the other. "The world took him to be a French imaginist like Chateaubriand... who the devil, Bramwell, supposed there was any truth in this old story? But by gad, sir, it's true! The water color shows it, and if you turn it over you will see that the map on the back of it gives the exact location of the spot. It's all exact work, even the fine lines of the map have the bearings indicated. The man who made that water color, and the drawing on the back of it, had been on the spot.

"Of course, we don't know conclusively who made it. Tony had gone in from the West coast after big game, and he found the thing put up as a sort of fetish in a devil house. It was one of the tribes near the Karamajo range. As I told you, we have only Tony's diary for it. I found the thing among his effects after he was killed in Flanders. It's pretty certain Tony did not understand the water color. There was only this single entry in the diary about how he found it, and a query in pencil.

"My word! if he had understood the water color, he would have beaten over every foot of Africa to Lake Leopold. And it would have been the biggest find of his time. Gad! what a splash he'd have made! But he never had any luck, the beggar... stopped a German bullet in the first week out.

"Now, how the devil, Bramwell, do you suppose that water color got into a native medicine house?"

The reflective voice replied slowly.

"I've thought about the thing, Sir Godfrey. It must have been the work of the Holland explorer, Maartin. He was all about in Africa, and he died in there somewhere, at least he never came out... that was ten years ago. I've looked him up, and I find that he could do a water color—in fact there's a collection of his water colors in, the Dutch museum. They're very fine work, like this one; exquisite, I'd say. The fellow was born an artist.

"How it got into the hands of a native devil doctor is not difficult to imagine. The sleeping sickness may have wiped Maartin out, or the natives may have rushed his camp some morning, or he may have been mauled by a beast. Any article of a white man is medicine stuff you know. When you first showed me the thing I was puzzled. I knew what it was because I had read Le Petit's pretension... I can't call it a pretension now; the things are there whether he saw them or not.

"I think he did not see them. But it is certain from this water color that some one did; and Maartin is the only explorer that could have done such a color. As soon as I thought of Maartin I knew the thing could have been done by no other."

Lady Muriel had remained motionless on the stair. The door to the drawing room, before her, was partly open. She stepped in to the angle of the wall and drew the door slowly back until it covered this angle in which she stood.

She was rich in such experiences, for her success had depended, not a little, on overhearing what was being said. Through the crack of the door the whole interior of the room was visible.

Sir Godfrey Halleck, a little dapper man, was sitting across the table from Bramwell Winton. His elbows were on the table, and he was looking eagerly at the biologist. Bramwell Winton had in his hands the thing under discussion.

It seemed to be a piece of cardboard or heavy paper about six inches in length by, perhaps, four in width. Lady Muriel could not see what was drawn or painted on this paper. But the heart in her bosom quickened. She had chanced on the spoor of something worth while.

The little dapper man flung his head up.

"Oh, it's certain, Bramwell; it's beyond any question now. My word! If Tony were only alive, or I twenty years younger! It's no great undertaking, to go in to the Karamajo Mountains. One could start from the West Coast, unship any place and pick up a bunch of natives. The map on the back of the water color is accurate. The man who made that knew how to travel in an unknown country. He must have had a theodolite and the very best equipment. Anybody could follow that map."

There was a battered old dispatch box on the table beside Sir Godfrey's arm—one that had seen rough service.

"Of course," he went on, "we don't know when Tony picked up this drawing. It was in this box here with his diary, an automatic pistol and some quinine. The date of the diary entry is the only clue. That would indicate that he was near the Karamajo range at the time, not far from the spot."

He snapped his fingers.

"What damned luck!"

He clinched his hands and brought them down on the table.

"I'm nearly seventy, Bramwell, but you're ten years under that. You could go in. No one need know the object of your expedition. Hector Bartlett didn't tell the whole of England when he went out to Syria for the gold plates. A scientist can go anywhere. No one wonders what he is about. It wouldn't take three months. And the climate isn't poisonous. I think it's mostly high ground. Tony didn't complain about it."

The biologist answered without looking up.

"I haven't got the money, Sir Godfrey."

The dapper little man jerked his head as over a triviality.

"I'll stake you. It wouldn't cost above five hundred pounds."

The biologist sat back in his chair, at the words, and looked over the table at his guest.

"That's awfully decent of you, Godfrey," he said, "and I'd go if I saw a way to get your money to you if anything happened."

"Damn the money!" cried the other.

The biologist smiled.

"Well," he said, "let me think about it. I could probably fix up some sort of insurance. Lloyd's will bet nearly any sane man that he won't die for three months. And besides I should wish to look things up a little."

Sir Godfrey rose.

"Oh, to be sure," he said, "you want to make certain about the thing. We might be wrong. I hadn't an idea what it was until I brought it to you, and of course Tony hadn't an idea. Make certain of it by all means."

The biologist extended his long legs under the table. He indicated the water color in his hand.

"This thing's certain," he said. "I know what this thing is."

He rapped the water color with the fingers of his free hand.

"This thing was painted on the spot. Maartin was looking at this thing when he painted it. You can see the big shadows underneath. No living creature could have imagined this or painted it from hearsay. He had to see it. And he did see it. I wasn't thinking about this, Godfrey. I was thinking the Dutch government might help a bit in the hope of finding some trace of Maartin and I should wish to examine any information they might have about him."

"Damn the Dutch government!" cried the little man. "And damn Lloyd's. We will go it on our own hook."

The biologist smiled.

"Let me think about it, a little," he said.

The dapper man flipped a big watch out of his waistcoat pocket.

"Surely!" he cried, "I must get the next train up. Have you got a place to lock the stuff? I had to cut this lid open with a chisel."

He indicated the tin dispatch box.

"Better keep it all. You'll want to run through the diary, I imagine. Tony's got down the things explorer chaps are always keen about; temperature, water supply, food and all that..... Now, I'm off. See you Thursday afternoon at the United Service Club. Better lunch with me."

Then he pushed the dispatch box across the table. The biologist rose and turned back the lid of the box. The contents remained as Sir Godfrey's dead son had left them; a limp leather diary, an automatic pistol of some American make, a few glass tubes of quinine, packed in cotton wool.

He put the water color on the bottom of the box and replaced them.

Then he took the dispatch box over to an old iron safe at the farther end of the room, opened it, set the box within, locked the door, and, returning, thrust the key under a pile of journals on the corner of the table. Then he went out, and down the stairway with his guest to the door.

They passed within a finger touch of Lady Muriel.

The woman was quick to act. There would be no borrowing from Bramwell Winton. He would now, with this expedition on the way, have no penny for another. But here before her, as though arranged by favor of Fatality, was something evidently of enormous value that she could cash in to Hecklemeir.

There was fame and fortune on the bottom of that dispatch box.

Something that would have been the greatest find of the age to Tony Halleck... something that the biologist, clearly from his words and manner, valued beyond the gold plates of Sir Hector Bartlett.

It was a thing that Hecklemeir would buy with money... the very thing which he would be at this opportune moment interested to purchase. She saw it in the very first comprehensive glance.

Her luck was holding Fortune was more than favorable, merely. It exercised itself actively, with evident concern, in her behalf.

Lady Muriel went swiftly into the room. She slipped the key from under the pile of journals and crossed to the safe sitting against the wall.

It was an old safe of some antediluvian manufacture and the lock was worn. The stem of the key was smooth and it slipped in her gloved hands. She could not hold it firm enough to turn the lock. Finally with her bare fingers and with one hand to aid the other she was able to move the lock and so open the safe.

She heard the door to the street close below, and the faint sound of Bramwell Winton's footsteps as though he went along the hall into the service portion of the house. She was nervous and hurried, but this reassured her.

The battered dispatch box sat within on the empty bottom of the a safe.

She lifted the lid; an automatic pistol lay on a limp leather-backed journal, stained, discolored and worn. Lady Muriel slipped her hand under these articles and lifted out the thing she sought.

Even in the pressing haste of her adventure, the woman could not forbear to look at the thing upon which these two men set so great a value. She stopped then a moment on her knees beside the safe, the prized article in her hands.

A map, evidently drawn with extreme care, was before her. She glanced at it hastily and turned the thing quickly over. What she saw amazed and puzzled her. Even in this moment of tense emotions she was astonished: She saw a pool of water,—not a pool of water in the ordinary sense—but a segment of water, as one would take a certain limited area of the surface of the sea or a lake or river. It was amber-colored and as smooth as glass, and on the surface of this water, as though they floated, were what appeared to be three, reddish-purple colored flowers, and beneath them on the bottom of the water were huge indistinct shadows.

The water was not clear to make out the shadows. But the appearing flowers were delicately painted. They stood out conspicuously on the glassy surface of the water as though they were raised above it.

Amazement held the woman longer than she thought, over this extraordinary thing. Then she thrust it into the bosom of her jacket, fastening the button securely over it.

The act kept her head down. When she lifted it Bramwell Winton was standing in the door.

In terror her hand caught up the automatic pistol out of the tin box. She acted with no clear, no determined intent. It was a gesture of fear and of indecision; escape through menace was perhaps the subconscious motive; the most primitive, the most common motive of all creatures in the corner. It extends downward from the human mind through all life.

To spring up, to drag the veil over her face with her free hand, and to thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial impulse of escape through menace.

Then a thing happened.

There was a sharp report and the figure standing in the doorway swayed a moment and fell forward into the room. The unconscious gripping of the woman's fingers had fired the pistol.

For a moment Lady Muriel stood unmoving, arrested in every muscle by this accident. But her steady wits—skilled in her profession—did not wholly desert her. She saw that the man was dead. There was peril in that—immense, uncalculated peril, but the prior and immediate peril, the peril of discovery in the very accomplishment of theft, was by this act averted.

She stooped over, her eyes fixed on the sprawling body and with her free hand closed the door of the safe. Then she crossed the room, put the pistol down on the floor near the dead man's hand and went out.

She went swiftly down the stairway and paused a moment at the door to look out. The street was empty. She hurried away.

She met no one. A cab in the distance was appearing. She hailed it as from a cross street and returned to Regent. It was characteristic of the woman that her mind dwelt upon the spoil she carried rather than upon the act she had done.

She puzzled at the water color. How could these things be flowers?

Bramwell Winton was a biologist; he would not be concerned with flowers. And Sir Godfrey Halleck and his son Tony, the big game hunter, were not men to bother themselves with blossoms. Sir Godfrey, as she now remembered vaguely, had, like his dead son, been a keen sportsman in his youth; his country house was full of trophies.

She carried buttoned in the bosom of her jacket something that these men valued. But, what was it? Well, at any rate it was something that would mean fame and fortune to the one who should bring it out of Africa. That one would now be Hecklemeir, and she should have her share of the spoil.

Lady Muriel found the drawing-room of her former employer in some confusion; rugs were rolled up, bronzes were being packed. But in the disorder of it the proprietor was imperturbable. He merely elevated his eyebrows at her reappearance. She went instantly to the point.

"Hecklemeir," she said, "how would you like to have a definite objective in your explorations?"

The man looked at her keenly.

"What do you mean precisely?" he replied.

"I mean," she continued, "something that would bring one fame and fortune if one found it." And she added, as a bit of lure, "You remember the gold plates Hector Bartlett dug up in Syria?"

He came over closer to her; his little eyes narrowed.

"What have you got?" he said.

His facetious manner—that vulgar persons imagine to be distinguished—was gone out of him. He was direct and simple.

She replied with no attempt at subterfuge.

"I've got a map of a route to some sort of treasure—I don't know what—It's in the Karamajo Mountains in the French Congo; a map to it and a water color of the thing."

Hecklemeir did not ask how Lady Muriel came by the thing she claimed; his profession always avoided such detail. But he knew that she had gone to Bramwell Winton; and what she had must have come from some scientific source. The mention of Hector Bartlett was not without its virtue.

Lady Muriel marked the man's changed manner, and pushed her trade.

"I want a check for a hundred pounds and a third of the thing when you bring it out."

Hecklemeir stood for a moment with the tips of his fingers pressed against his lips; then replied.

"If you have anything like the thing you describe, I'll give you a hundred pounds... let me see it."

She took the water color out of the bosom of her jacket and gave it to him.

He carried it over to the window and studied it a moment. Then he turned with a sneering oath.

"The devil take your treasure," he said, "these things are water-elephants. I don't care a farthing if they stand on the bottom of every lake in Africa!"

And he flung the water color toward her. Mechanically the stunned woman picked it up and smoothed it out in her fingers.

With the key to the picture she saw it clearly, the shadowy bodies of the beasts and the tips of their trunks distended on the surface like a purple flower. And vaguely, as though it were a memory from a distant life, she recalled hearing the French Ambassador and Baron Rudd discussing the report of an explorer who pretended to have seen these supposed fabulous elephants come out of an African forest and go down under the waters of Lake Leopold.

She stood there a moment, breaking the thing into pieces with her bare hands. Then she went out. At the door on the landing she very nearly stepped against a little cockney.

"My Lidy," he whined, "I was bringing your gloves; you dropped them on your way up."

She took them mechanically and began to draw them on... the cryptic sign of the cleaner on the wrist hem was now to her indicatory of her submerged estate. The little cockney hung about a moment as for a gratuity delayed, then he disappeared down the stair before her.

She went slowly down, fitting the gloves to her fingers.

Midway of the flight she paused. The voice of the little cockney, but without the accent, speaking to a Bobby standing beside the entrance reached her.

"It was Sir Henry Marquis who set the Yard to register all laundry marks in London. Great C. I. D. Chief, Sir Henry!"

And Lady Muriel remembered that she had removed these gloves in order to turn the slipping key in Bramwell Winton's safe lock.



X.-The Last Adventure

The talk had run on treasure.

I could not sleep and my friends had dropped in. I had the big South room on the second floor of the Hotel de Paris. It looks down on the Casino and the Mediterranean. Perhaps you know it.

Queer friends, you'd say. Every man-jack of them a gambler. But when one begins to sit about all night with his eyes open, the devil's a friend.

Barclay was standing before the fire. The others had drifted out. He's a big man pitted with the smallpox. He made a gesture, flinging out his hand toward the door.

"That bunch thinks there's a curse on treasure, Sir Henry. That's one of the oldest notions in the world... it's unlucky."

"But I know where there's a treasure that's not unlucky. At least it was not unlucky for poor Charlie Tavor. He did not get it, but there was no curse on it that reached to him. It helped poor Charlie finish in style. He died like a lord in a big country house, with a formal garden and a line of lackeys."

Barclay paused.

"Queer chap, Tavor. He was the best all round explorer in the world. I bar nobody. Charlie Tavor could take a nigger and cross the poisonous plateau south west of the Libyan desert. I've backed him. I know... but he had no business sense, anybody could fool him. He found the stock of bar silver on the west face of the Andes that made old Nute Hardman a quarter of a million dollars, clear, after the cursed beast had split it a half dozen ways with a crooked South American government."

Barclay's teeth set and he jerked up his clinched hand.

"It was a damned steal, Sir Henry. A piece of low down, dirty robbery; and it was like taking candy away from a child.... 'Sign here, Mr. Tavor,' and Charlie would scrawl on his fist.. .. Some people think there's no hell, but what's God Almighty going to do with Old Nute?"

He flung out his hand again.

"Still the thing didn't dent Charlie. He never missed a step. 'Don't bother, Barclay, old man,' he'd say, 'I'll find something else,' and then he'd go off into this dream he had of coming back when he'd struck it, to the old home county in England and laying it over the bunch that had called him 'no good.' He never talked much, but I gathered from odds and ends that he was the black sheep in a pretty smart flock.

"Then, I'd stake him to a cheap outfit—not much, I've said he could push through the Libyan desert with a nigger—and he'd drop out of the world. It wasn't charity. I got my money's worth. The clay pots he brought me from Yucatan would sell any day for more cash than I ever advanced him."

Barclay moved a little before the fire. I was listening in a big chair, my feet extended toward the hearth; a smoking jacket had replaced my dinner coat.

"It was five years ago, in London," Barclay went on, "that I fitted Charlie out for his last adventure. He wanted to land in the gulf of Pe-chi-li and go into the great desert of the Shamo in Central Mongolia. You'll find the Shamo all dotted out on the maps; but it's faked dope. No white man knows anything about the Shamo.

"It's a trick to lay off these great waste areas and call them elevated plateaus or sunken plateaus. You can't go by the atlas. Where's Kane's Open Polar Sea and Morris K. Jessup's Land? Still, Charlie thought the Shamo might be a low plain, and he thought he might find something in it. You see the great gold caravans used to cross it, three thousand years ago... and as Charlie kept saying, 'What's time in the Shamo?'

"Well, I bought him a kit of stuff, and he took a P. and O. through the Suez. I got a long letter from Pekin two months later; and then Charlie Tavor dropped out of the world. I went back to America. No word ever came from Charlie. I thought he was dead. I suppose a white man's life is about the cheapest thing there is northwest of the Yellow River; and Charlie never had an escort. A coolie and an old service pistol would about foot up his defenses.

"And there's every ghastly disease in Mongolia.... Still some word always came from Tavor inside of a year; a tramp around the Horn would bring in a dirty note, written God knows where, and carried out to the ship by a naked native swimming with the thing in his teeth; or some little embassy would send it to me in a big official envelope stamped with enough red wax to make a saint's candle.

"But the luck failed this time. A year ran on, then two, then three and I passed Charlie up. He'd surely 'gone west!'"

Barclay paused, thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner jacket and looked down at me.

"One night in New York I got a call from the City Hospital. The telephone message came in about ten o'clock. I was in Albany; I found the message when I got back the following morning and I went ever to the hospital.

"The matron said that they had picked up a man on the North River docks in an epileptic fit and the only name they could find on him was my New York address. They thought he was going to die, he was cold and stiff for hours, and they had undertaken to reach me in order to identify him. But he did not die. He was up this morning and she would bring him in."

Barclay paused again.

"She brought in Charlie Tavor!... And I nearly screamed when I saw the man. He was dressed in one of those cheap hand-me-downs that the Germans used to sell in the tropics for a pound, three and six, his eyes looked as dead as glass and he was as white as plaster. How the man managed to keep on his feet I don't know.

"I didn't stop for any explanation. I got Tavor into a taxi, and over to my apartment."

Barclay moved in his position before the fire.

"But on the way over a thing happened that some little god played in for a joke. There was a block just where Thirty-third crosses into Fifth Avenue, and our taxi pulled up by a limousine."

Barclay suddenly thrust out his big pock-marked face.

"The thing couldn't have happened by itself. Some burlesque angel put it over when the Old Man wasn't looking. Spread out on the tapestry cushions of that limousine was Nute Hardman!

"There they were side by side. Not six feet apart; Old Nute in a sable-lined coat and Charlie in his hand-me-down, at a pound, three and six."

The muscles in Barclay's big jaw tightened.

"Maybe there is a joker that runs the world, and maybe the devil runs it. Anyhow it's a queer system. Here was Charlie Tavor, straight as a string, down and out. And here was Nute Hardman, so crooked that a fly couldn't light on him and stand level, with everything that money could buy.

"I cast it up while the taxi stood there beside the car. Nute was consul in a South American port that you couldn't spell and couldn't find on the map. He didn't have two dollars to rub together, until Charlie Tavor turned up. There he sat, out of the world, forgotten, growing moss and getting ready to rot; and God Almighty, or the devil, or whatever it is, steered Charlie Tavor in to him with the bar silver.

"He picked Charlie to the bone and cut for the States. And this damned crooked luck went right along with him. He was in a big apartment, now, up on Fifth Avenue and four-flushing toward every point of the compass. His last stunt was 'patron of science.' He'd gotten into the Geographical Society, and he was laying lines for the Royal Society in London. He had a Harvard don working over in the Metropolitan library, building him a thesis!

"The thing made me ugly. I wanted to have a plain talk with the devil. He wasn't playing fair. Old Nute couldn't have been worth the whole run of us; I've legged some myself, and I had a right to be heard. The devil ought to make old Nute split up with Charlie. True, Charlie belonged in the other camp, but I didn't. And if I wanted a little favor I felt that the devil ought to come across with it... I put it up to him, or down to him, as you'd say, while I sat there in that taxi."

There was a grim energy in Barclay's face. He was no ordinary person.

"I got Tavor up to my apartment, and a goblet of brandy in him. I never saw anybody look like Tavor as he sat there propped up in the chair with a lot of cushions around him. It was winter and cold. He had no clothes to speak of, but he did not seem to notice either the cold outside or the heat in the apartment, as though, somehow, he couldn't tell the difference.

"And he was the strangest color that any human being ever was in the world. I've said that he looked like plaster, and he did look like it, but he looked like a plaster man with a thin coat of tan colored paint on him."

Barclay paused.

"It's hardly a wonder that no message reached me. The devil couldn't have got word out of the hell land he'd been in. Lost is no name for it. He'd been all over the Shamo, and the big Sahara's a park to it. He'd been North to the Kangai where they used to get the gold that the caravans carried across the Shamo, and he'd followed the old trails South to the great wall.

"It's all a Satan's country. I don't know why God Almighty wanted to make a hell hole like the Shamo!"

He paused, then he went on.

"But it wasn't in the Shamo that Tavor got track of the thing he was after. He said that the age he was trying to get back into was much more remote than he imagined. It must have been a good many thousands of years ago. He couldn't tell; long before anything like dependable history at any rate.... There must have been an immense age of great oriental splendor in the South of Asia and along the East African coast, dying out at about the time our knowledge of human history begins."

Barclay went on, unmoving before the fire.

"I don't know why we imagine that the legends of a little tribe in Syria running back to the fifth or sixth century begins the world.... Anyway, Tavor got the notion, as I have said, of an age in decay at about the time these legends start in; with a trade moving west.

"He nosed it all out! God knows how. Of course it was only a theory—only a notion in fact. He hadn't anything to go on that I could see. But after two years' drifting about in the Shamo, this is how he finally figured it:

"Northern Asia traded gold in the west; the mined product would be molded into bricks in lower Mongolia. It was then carried over land to the southwest coast of Arabia. There was some great center of world commerce low down on the Red Sea about eight hundred miles south of Port Said.

"Tavor said that when he began to think about the thing the caravan route was pretty clear to him. Arabia seemed to have been connected, in that remote age, with Persia at the Strait of Ormus, so there was a direct overland route.... That put another notion into Tavor's head; these treasure caravans must have crossed the immense Sandy Desert of El-Khali. And this notion developed another; if one were seeking the wreck of any one of these treasure caravans he would be more likely to find it in the El-Khali than in the Shamo."

Barclay moved away from the fire, got a chair and sat down. He was across the hearth from me. He looked about the room and at the curtained windows that shut out the blue night.

"You can't sleep," he went on, "so I might just as well tell you this. A good deal of it is what the lawyers called dicta... obiter dicta; when the judge gets to putting in stuff on the side ... but it's a long time 'til daylight."

He had taken a small chair and he sat straight in it after the manner of a big man.

"You see the treasure carried south across the Shamo would be 'gold wheat' (dust, we'd call it), packed in green skins... you couldn't find that. But the caravans crossing the El-Khali would carry this gold in bricks for the great west trade. Now a gold brick is indestructible; you can't think of anything that would last forever like a gold brick. Nothing would disturb it, water and sun are alike without effect on it....

"That was Tavor's notion, and he went right after it. Most of us would have slacked out after two years in the hell hole of Central Mongolia. But not Charlie Tavor. He got down to Arabia somehow; God knows, I never asked him,—and he went right on into the Great Sandy Desert of Roba El Khali. The oldest caravan route known runs straight across the desert from Muscat to Mecca. It's a thousand miles across—but you can strike the line of it nearly four hundred miles west in a hundred miles travel by going due South from the coast between fifty and fifty-five degrees.

"You'll find this old caravan route drawn on the map, a dead straight line across the thirty-third parallel. But the man that put it on there never traveled over it. He doesn't know whether it is a sunken plateau, or an elevated plateau, or what the devil it is that this old route runs across. And he doesn't know what the earth's like in the great basin of the El-Khali; maybe it's sand and maybe it's something else."

Barclay stopped and looked queerly at me.

"The Doctor Cooks have put a lot of stuff over on us. The fact is, there's six million square miles of the earth's surface that nobody knows anything about."

He got a package of American cigarettes out of his pocket, selected one and lighted it with a fragment of the box thrust into the fire.

"That's where Tavor was the last year. When the ambulance picked him up, he'd crawled around the Horn in a Siamese tramp."

He paused.

"Great people, the English; no fag-out to them. Look how Scott went on in the Antarctic with his feet frozen... It's in the blood; it was in Tavor.

"I sat there that winter night in my room in New York while he told me all about it.

"It was morning when he finished—the milk wagons were on the street,—and then, he added, quite simply, as though it were a matter of no importance,

"'But I can't go back, Barclay, old man; my tramping's over. That was no fit I had on the dock.'

"He looked at me with his dead eyes in his tan-colored plaster face. You've heard of the hemp-chewers and the betel-chewers; well, all that's baby-food to a thing they've got in the Shamo. It's a shredded root, bitter like cactus, and when you chew it, you don't get tired and you don't get hot... you go on and you don't know what the temperature is. Then some day, all at once, you go down, cold all over like a dead man... that time you don't die, but the next time..."

Barclay snapped his fingers without adding the word.'

"And you can calculate when the second one will strike you. It's a hundred and eighty-one days to the hour."

Then he added:

"That was the first one on the dock. Tavor had six months to live."

The big man broke the cigarette in his fingers and threw the pieces into the fire. Then he turned abruptly toward me.

"And I know where he wanted to live for those six months. The old dream was still with him. He wanted that country house in his native county in England, with the formal garden and the lackeys. The finish didn't bother him, but he wanted to round out his life with the dream that he had carried about with him.

"I put him to bed and went down into Broadway, and walked about all night. Tavor couldn't go back and he had to have a bunch of money.

"It was no good. I couldn't see it. I went back Tavor was up and I sat him down to a cross examination that would have delighted the soul of a Philadelphia lawyer."

Barclay paused.

"It was all at once that I saw it—like you'd snap your fingers. It was an accident of Charlie's talk... one of those obiter dicta, that I mentioned a while ago. But I stopped Charlie and went over to the Metropolitan Library; there I got me an expert—an astronomer chap, as it happened, reading calculus in French for fun—I gave him a twenty and I looked him in the eye.

"Now, Professor,' I said, 'this dope's got to be straight stuff, I'm risking money on it; every word you write has got to be the truth, and every line and figure that you put on your map has got to be correct with a capital K.'"

"'Surely,' he said, 'I shall follow Huxley for the text and I shall check the chart calculations for error.'

"'And there's another thing, professor. You've got to go dumb on this job, for which I double the twenty.' He looked puzzled, but when he finally understood me, he said 'Surely' again, and I went back to my apartment.

"'Charlie,' I said, 'how much money would it take for this English country life business?'

"His eyes lighted up a little.

"'Well, Barclay, old man,' he replied, 'I've estimated it pretty carefully a number of times. I could take Eldon's place for six months with the right to purchase for two thousand dollars paid down; and I could manage the servants and the living expenses for another four thousand. I fear I should not be able to get on with a less sum than six thousand dollars.'

"Then," he added—he was a child to the last—"perhaps Mr. Hardman will now be able to advance it; he promised me 'a further per cent'," those were his words, when the matter was finally concluded.

"Then ten thousand would do?"

"My word,' he said, 'I should go it like a lord on ten thousand. Do you think Mr. Hardman would consider that sum?'

"'I'm going to try him,' I said, 'I've got some influence in a quarter that he depends on.'

"And I went out. I went down to my bank and got twenty U. S. bonds of a thousand each. At five o'clock, the professor had his dope ready—the text and the chart, neatly folded in a big manilla envelope with a rubber band around it. And that evening I went up to see old Nute."

Barclay got another cigarette. There was a queer cynicism in his big pitted face.

"The church bunch," he said, "have got a strange conception of the devil; they think he's always ready to lie down on his friends. That's a fool notion. The devil couldn't do business if he didn't come across when you needed him.

"And there's another thing; the old-timers, when they went after their god for a favor, always began by reciting what they'd done for him.... That was sound dope! I tried it myself on the way up to old Nute's apartment on Fifth Avenue.

"I went over a lot of things. And whenever I made a point, I rapped it on the pavement with the ferule of my walking stick; as one would say, 'you owe me for that!'

"You see I was worked up about Tavor. When a man's carried a dream over all the hell he'd pushed through he ought to have it in the end."

Barclay paused and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

"You know the swell apartments on Fifth Avenue; no name, only a number; every floor a residence, only the elevators connecting them. I found old Nute in the seventh; and I was bucked the moment I got in.

"The door from the drawing room to the library was open. The Harvard don was going out, the one Nute had employed to get up his thesis for the Royal Society of London—I mentioned him a while ago. And I heard his final remark, flung back at the door. 'What you require, Sir, is the example case of some new exploration—one that you have yourself conducted.'

"That bucked me; the devil was on the job!"

Barclay stopped again. He sat for a moment watching the smoke from the cigarette climb in a blue mist slowly into the beautiful fresco of the ceiling.

"I told old Nute precisely what I've told you. How I'd backed Tavor for his last adventure, and where he'd been; all over Central Mongolia and finally across the Great Sandy Desert of El-Khali. And I told him what Charlie was after; the theory he started with and his final conclusion when he made his last push along the old caravan route west from Muscat.

"I went into the details, and the big notion that Tavor had slowly pieced together; how the gold was mined in the ranges south of Siberia, carried in green skins to lower Mongolia, melted there and taken for trade Southwest across the El-Khali to an immense Babylon of Commerce of which the present Mecca is perhaps a decadent residuum.

"I put it all in; the accessibility of this desert from the coast on three sides, how the old caravan route parallels the thirty-third meridian and how Charlie struck it four hundred miles out into the desert in a hundred miles travel due south in longitude between 50 and 55 degrees; all the details of Tavor's hunt for the wreck of one of these treasure caravans.

"Old Nute looked at me with his little hard eyes slipping about.

"'And he didn't find it?' he said.

"I didn't answer that. I went ahead and told him how I found Tavor and the shape he was in, and then I added, 'I'm not an explorer, and Charlie can't go back.'

"Old Nute's thick neck shot out at that.

"'Then he did find it?' he said.

"'Now look here, Nute,' I said, 'you're not trading with Tavor on this deal. You're trading with me and I'm just as slick as you are. You'll get no chance to slip under on this. You forget all I've told you just as though it had nothing to do with what I'm going to tell you, and I'll come to the point.'

"'Forget it?' he said.

"'Yes,' I said, 'forget it. I'm not going to put you on to what Charlie knows, with any strings to it, or with any pointers that you can run down without us. I've told you all about Tavor's big hunt through the Shamo and the El-Khali for a purpose of my own and not for the purpose of enabling you to locate the thing that Charlie Tavor knows about.'

"Hardman's voice went down into a low note. 'What does he know?' he said.

"I looked him squarely in the little reptilian eyes. 'He knows where there is a treasure in gold equal in our money to three hundred thousand dollars!'

"Old Nute's little eyes focused into his nose an instant. Then he took a chance at me.

"'What's the country like?'

"I went on as though I didn't see the drift.

"'Tavor says this area of the earth's surface is a great plain practically level, sloping gradually on one side and rising gradually on the other.'

"'Sand?' said Nute.

"'No,' I replied, 'Tavor says that contrary to the common notion, this plain is not covered with sand, it's a kind of chalk deposit.'

"'Hard to get to?'

"Old Nute shot the query in with a little quick duck of his head.

"I went straight on with the answer.

"'Tavor says it's about a five or six days' journey from a sea coast town.'

"'Hard traveling?'

"'No, Tavor says you can get within two miles of the place without any difficulty whatever—he says anybody can do it. The only difficulties are on the last two miles. But up to the last two miles, it's a holiday journey for a middle-aged woman.'

"Old Nute grunted. He put his fat hands together over his waistcoat and twiddled his thumbs.

"'Well,'; he said, 'what's in your mind about it?'

"We were now up to the trade and I stated the terms.

"'It's like this,' I said, 'Tavor's down and out. He's got only six months to live. Fifth Avenue piled full of gold won't do him any good if he's got to wait for it. What he wants is a little money quick!'

"Old Nute's eyes squinted.

"'How much money?' he said.

"'Well,' I said, 'Tavor will turn his map over to you for ten thousand dollars... Death's crowding him.'

"Old Nute's fat fingers began to drum on his waistcoat.

"'How do I know the gold's there and the map's straight?'

"'Did you ever know Tavor to lie?' I said.

"'No,' he said, 'Tavor's not a liar; but I am a business man, Mr. Barclay, and in business we do not go on verbal assurances, no matter how unquestioned.'

"'That's right,' I replied, 'I'm a business man, too; that's why I came instead of sending Tavor.... you found out he wasn't a business man in the first deal.'

"Then I took my 'shooting irons' out of my pocket and laid them on the table.

"There,' I said, 'are twenty, one-thousand United States bonds, not registered,' and I put my hand on one of the big manilla envelopes; 'and here,' I said, 'is an accurate description of the place where this treasure lies and a map of the route to it,' and I put my hand on the other.

"'Now,' I went on, 'I believe every word of this thing. Charles Tavor is the best all-round explorer in the world. I've known him a lifetime and what he says goes with me. We'll put up this bunch of stuff with a stakeholder for the term of a year, and if the gold isn't there and if the map showing the route to it isn't correct and if every word I've said about it isn't precisely the truth, you take down my bonds and keep them.'

"Old Nute got up and walked about the room. I knew what he was thinking. 'Here's another one of them—there's all kinds.'

"But it hooked him. We wrote out the terms and put the stuff up with old Commodore Harris—the straightest sport in America. Nute had the right to copy the map, and the text and a year to verify it. And I took the ten thousand back to Charlie Tavor."

Barclay got up and went over to the window. He drew back the heavy tapestry curtains. It was morning; the blue dawn was beginning to illumine Monaco and the polished arc of the sea. He stood looking down into it, holding the curtain in his hand.

"I give the devil his due for that, Sir Henry," he said. "Charlie Tavor got his dream at the end; he died like a gentleman in his English country house with the formal garden and the lackeys."

"And the other man got the treasure?" I said. Barclay replied without moving.

"No, he didn't get it."

"Then you lost your bonds?"

"No, I didn't lose them; Commodore Harris handed them back to me on the last day of the year."

I sat up in my big lounge chair.

"Didn't Hardman make a fight for them; if he didn't find the treasure—didn't he squeal?"

Barclay turned about, drawing the curtain close behind him.

"And be laughed out of the high-brow bunch that he was trying to get into?... I said old Nute was a crook, but I didn't say he was a fool."

I turned around in the chair.

"I don't understand this thing, Barclay. If the treasure was there, and you gave Hardman a correct map of the route to it, and it lay on a practically level plain, and he could get within two miles of it without difficulty in four or five days' travel from a sea coast town, why couldn't he get it? Was it all the truth?"

"It was every word precisely the truth," he said.

"Then why couldn't he get it?"

Barclay looked down at me; his big pitted face was illumined with a cynical smile.

"Well, Sir Henry," he said, "'the trouble is with those last two miles. They're water... straight down. The level plain is the bed of the Atlantic ocean and that gold is in the hold of the Titanic."



XI.-American Horses

The thing began in the colony room of the Empire Club in London. The colony room is on the second floor and looks out over Piccadilly Circus. It was at an hour when nobody is in an English club. There was a drift of dirty fog outside. Such nights come along in October.

Douglas Hargrave did not see the Baronet until he closed the door behind him. Sir Henry was seated at a table, leaning over, his face between his hand, and his elbows resting on the polished mahogany board. There was a sheet of paper on the table between the Baronet's elbows. There were a few lines written on the paper and the man's faculties were concentrated on them. He did not see the jewel dealer until that person was half across the room, then he called to him.

"Hello, Hargrave," he said. "Do you know anything about ciphers?"

"Only the trade one that our firm uses," replied the jewel dealer. "And that's a modification of the A B C code."

"Well," he said, "take a look at this."

The jewel dealer sat down at the other side of the table and the Baronet handed him the sheet of paper. The man expected to see a lot of queer signs and figures; but instead he found a simple trade's message, as it seemed to him.

P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on freight steamer Don Carlow from N. Y.

Have the bill of lading handed over to our agent to check up.

"Well," said the jewel dealer, "somebody's going to ship nine hundred horses. Where's the mystery?"

The Baronet shrugged his big shoulders.

"The mystery," he said, "is everywhere. It's before and after and in the body of this message. There's hardly anything to it but mystery."

"Who sent it?" said Hargrave.

"That's one of the mysteries," replied the Baronet.

"Ah!" said the jewel dealer. "Who received it?"

"That's another," he answered.

"At any rate," continued Hargrave, "you know where you got it."