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"'Now look here, Nute, I said, 'you're not trading with Tavor on this deal. You're trading with me and I'm just as slick as you are. You'll get no chance to slip under on this. You forget all I've told you just as though it had nothing to do with what I'm going to tell you, and I'll come to the point. "'Forget it? he said. "'Yes, I said, 'forget it.
"Old Nute's eyes squinted. "'How much money? he said. "'Well, I said, 'Tavor will turn his map over to you for ten thousand dollars... 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.
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.
He made a gesture, flinging out his hand toward the door. "That bunch thinks there's a curse on treasure, Sir Henry. That's one of the oldest notions in the world... it's unlucky." "But I know where there's a treasure that's not unlucky. At least it was not unlucky for poor Charlie Tavor. He did not get it, but there was no curse on it that reached to him. It helped poor Charlie finish in style.
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.
He died like a lord in a big country house, with a formal garden and a line of lackeys." Barclay paused. "Queer chap, Tavor. He was the best all round explorer in the world. I bar nobody. Charlie Tavor could take a nigger and cross the poisonous plateau south west of the Libyan desert. I've backed him. I know... but he had no business sense, anybody could fool him.
The fact is, there's six million square miles of the earth's surface that nobody knows anything about." He got a package of American cigarettes out of his pocket, selected one and 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.
"I went straight on with the answer. "'Tavor says it's about a five or six days' journey from a sea coast town. "'Hard traveling? "'No, Tavor says you can get within two miles of the place without any difficulty whatever he says anybody can do it. The only difficulties are on the last two miles. But up to the last two miles, it's a holiday journey for a middle-aged woman. "Old Nute grunted.
He wanted that country house in his native county in England, with the formal garden and the lackeys. The finish didn't bother him, but he wanted to round out his life with the dream that he had carried about with him. "I put him to bed and went down into Broadway, and walked about all night. Tavor couldn't go back and he had to have a bunch of money. "It was no good. I couldn't see it.
"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.
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