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Page 78
"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:
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