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Page 77
"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.
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