|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 81
"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.'
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|