The Sleuth of St. James's Square Read online

  X.-The Last Adventure

  The talk had run on treasure.

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

  Queer friends, you'd say. Every man-jack of them a gambler. But when onebegins 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'sa big man pitted with the smallpox. He made a gesture, flinging out hishand toward the door.

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

  "But I know where there's a treasure that's not unlucky. At least it wasnot unlucky for poor Charlie Tavor. He did not get it, but there was nocurse 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 aline of lackeys."

  Barclay paused.

  "Queer chap, Tavor. He was the best all round explorer in the world. Ibar nobody. Charlie Tavor could take a nigger and cross the poisonousplateau south west of the Libyan desert. I've backed him. I know... buthe had no business sense, anybody could fool him. He found the stock ofbar silver on the west face of the Andes that made old Nute Hardman aquarter of a million dollars, clear, after the cursed beast had split ita 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 thinkthere'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'tbother, Barclay, old man,' he'd say, 'I'll find something else,' andthen he'd go off into this dream he had of coming back when he'd struckit, to the old home county in England and laying it over the bunch thathad called him 'no good.' He never talked much, but I gathered from oddsand 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 couldpush through the Libyan desert with a nigger--and he'd drop out ofthe world. It wasn't charity. I got my money's worth. The clay pots hebrought me from Yucatan would sell any day for more cash than I everadvanced 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 mydinner coat.

  "It was five years ago, in London," Barclay went on, "that I fittedCharlie out for his last adventure. He wanted to land in the gulf ofPe-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 elevatedplateaus or sunken plateaus. You can't go by the atlas. Where's Kane'sOpen Polar Sea and Morris K. Jessup's Land? Still, Charlie thought theShamo might be a low plain, and he thought he might find something init. You see the great gold caravans used to cross it, three thousandyears 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 theSuez. I got a long letter from Pekin two months later; and then CharlieTavor dropped out of the world. I went back to America. No word evercame from Charlie. I thought he was dead. I suppose a white man's lifeis about the cheapest thing there is northwest of the Yellow River; andCharlie never had an escort. A coolie and an old service pistol wouldabout foot up his defenses.

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

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

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

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

  "The matron said that they had picked up a man on the North River docksin an epileptic fit and the only name they could find on him was my NewYork address. They thought he was going to die, he was cold and stifffor 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 theman. He was dressed in one of those cheap hand-me-downs that the Germansused to sell in the tropics for a pound, three and six, his eyes lookedas dead as glass and he was as white as plaster. How the man managed tokeep on his feet I don't know.

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

  Barclay moved in his position before the fire.

  "But on the way over a thing happened that some little god played infor a joke. There was a block just where Thirty-third crosses into FifthAvenue, 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 putit over when the Old Man wasn't looking. Spread out on the tapestrycushions of that limousine was Nute Hardman!

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

  The muscles in Barclay's big jaw tightened.

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

  "I cast it up while the taxi stood there beside the car. Nute was consulin a South American port that you couldn't spell and couldn't find onthe map. He didn't have two dollars to rub together, until Charlie Tavorturned up. There he sat, out of the world, forgotten, growing moss andgetting 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 damnedcrooked luck went right along with him. He was in a big apartment, now,up on Fifth Avenue and four-flushing toward every point of thecompass. His last stunt was 'patron of science.' He'd gotten into theGeographical Society, and he was laying lines for the Royal Society inLondon. 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 runof us; I've legged some myself, and I had a right to be heard. The devilought to make old Nute split up with Charlie. True, Charlie belonged inthe other camp, but I didn't. And if I wanted a little favor I felt thatthe devil ought to come across with it... I put it up to him, or down tohim, 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 neversaw anybody look like Tavor as he sat there propped up in the chair witha lot of cushions around him. It was winter and cold. He had no clothesto speak of, but he did not seem to notice either the cold outside orthe heat in the apartment, as though, somehow, he couldn't tell thedifference.

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

  Barclay paused.

  "It's hardly a wonder that no message reached me. The devil couldn'thave 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'dbeen North to the Kangai where they used to get the gold that thecaravans carried across the Shamo, and he'd followed the old trailsSouth to the great wall.

  "It's all a Satan's country. I don't know why God Almighty wanted tomake 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 wasafter. He said that the age he was trying to get back into was muchmore remote than he imagined. It must have been a good many thousandsof years ago. He couldn't tell; long before anything like dependablehistory at any rate.... There must have been an immense age of greatoriental 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 Syriarunning 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 thetime these legends start in; with a trade moving west.

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

  "Northern Asia traded gold in the west; the mined product would bemolded into bricks in lower Mongolia. It was then carried over landto the southwest coast of Arabia. There was some great center of worldcommerce low down on the Red Sea about eight hundred miles south of PortSaid.

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

  Barclay moved away from the fire, got a chair and sat down. He wasacross the hearth from me. He looked about the room and at the curtainedwindows 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; whenthe 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 ofa big man.

  "You see the treasure carried south across the Shamo would be 'goldwheat' (dust, we'd call it), packed in green skins... you couldn't findthat. But the caravans crossing the El-Khali would carry this gold inbricks 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 onit....

  "That was Tavor's notion, and he went right after it. Most of us wouldhave 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 neverasked him,--and he went right on into the Great Sandy Desert of Roba ElKhali. The oldest caravan route known runs straight across the desertfrom Muscat to Mecca. It's a thousand miles across--but you can strikethe line of it nearly four hundred miles west in a hundred miles travelby 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 straightline across the thirty-third parallel. But the man that put it on therenever 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 runsacross. And he doesn't know what the earth's like in the great basin ofthe 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 nobodyknows anything about."

  He got a package of American cigarettes out of his pocket, selected oneand 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 onin the Antarctic with his feet frozen... It's in the blood; it was inTavor.

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

  "It was morning when he finished--the milk wagons were on thestreet,--and then, he added, quite simply, as though it were a matter ofno importance,

  "'But I can't go back, Barclay, old man; my tramping's over. That was nofit 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'sbaby-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 youdon't get hot... you go on and you don't know what the temperatureis. Then some day, all at once, you go down, cold all over like a deadman... 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 ahundred 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 intothe fire. Then he turned abruptly toward me.

  "And I know where he wanted to live for those six months. The old dreamwas still with him. He wanted that country house in his native countyin England, with the formal garden and the lackeys. The finish didn'tbother him, but he wanted to round out his life with the dream that hehad carried about with him.

  "I put him to bed and went down into Broadway, and walked about allnight. 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 sathim down to a cross examination that would have delighted the soul of aPhiladelphia lawyer."

  Barclay paused.

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

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

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

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

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

  "His eyes lighted up a little.

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

  "Then," he added--he was a child to the last--"perhaps Mr. Hardman wil
lnow be able to advance it; he promised me 'a further per cent'," thosewere 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 youthink Mr. Hardman would consider that sum?'

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

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

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

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

  "And there's another thing; the old-timers, when they went after theirgod 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'sapartment on Fifth Avenue.

  "I went over a lot of things. And whenever I made a point, I rapped iton 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 overall 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 oldNute 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 donwas going out, the one Nute had employed to get up his thesis for theRoyal Society of London--I mentioned him a while ago. And I heard hisfinal remark, flung back at the door. 'What you require, Sir, isthe example case of some new exploration--one that you have yourselfconducted.'

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

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

  "I told old Nute precisely what I've told you. How I'd backed Tavor forhis last adventure, and where he'd been; all over Central Mongolia andfinally across the Great Sandy Desert of El-Khali. And I told him whatCharlie was after; the theory he started with and his final conclusionwhen 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 slowlypieced together; how the gold was mined in the ranges south of Siberia,carried in green skins to lower Mongolia, melted there and taken fortrade Southwest across the El-Khali to an immense Babylon of Commerce ofwhich the present Mecca is perhaps a decadent residuum.

  "I put it all in; the accessibility of this desert from the coaston three sides, how the old caravan route parallels the thirty-thirdmeridian and how Charlie struck it four hundred miles out into thedesert in a hundred miles travel due south in longitude between 50 and55 degrees; all the details of Tavor's hunt for the wreck of one ofthese 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 andthe shape he was in, and then I added, 'I'm not an explorer, and Charliecan'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 thisdeal. You're trading with me and I'm just as slick as you are. You'llget no chance to slip under on this. You forget all I've told you justas though it had nothing to do with what I'm going to tell you, and I'llcome to the point.'

  "'Forget it?' he said.

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

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

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

  "Old Nute's little eyes focused into his nose an instant. Then he took achance 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 plainpractically level, sloping gradually on one side and rising gradually onthe other.'

  "'Sand?' said Nute.

  "'No,' I replied, 'Tavor says that contrary to the common notion, thisplain 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 coasttown.'

  "'Hard traveling?'

  "'No, Tavor says you can get within two miles of the place without anydifficulty whatever--he says anybody can do it. The only difficultiesare on the last two miles. But up to the last two miles, it's a holidayjourney for a middle-aged woman.'

  "Old Nute grunted. He put his fat hands together over his waistcoat andtwiddled 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 sixmonths to live. Fifth Avenue piled full of gold won't do him any good ifhe'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 thousanddollars... 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 matterhow unquestioned.'

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

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

  "There,' I said, 'are twenty, one-thousand United States bonds, notregistered,' and I put my hand on one of the big manilla envelopes;'and here,' I said, 'is an accurate description of the place where thistreasure lies and a map of the route to it,' and I put my hand on theother.

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

  "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 oldCommodore Harris--the straightest sport in America. Nute had the rightto copy the map, and the text and a year to verify it. And I took theten thousand back to Charlie Tavor."

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

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

  "And the other man got the treasure?" I said. Barclay replied withoutmoving.

  "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 thelast 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 thetreasure--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 getinto?... 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 apractically level plain, and he could get within two miles of it withoutdifficulty in four or five days' travel from a sea coast town, whycouldn'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 acynical 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 theAtlantic ocean and that gold is in the hold of the Titanic."