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Page 83
"`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?"
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