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Updated: June 3, 2025
'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.
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 think there'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.
"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.
Most of us would have 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 never asked him, and he went right on into the Great Sandy Desert of Roba El Khali. The oldest caravan route known runs straight across the desert from Muscat to Mecca.
There was some great center of world commerce low down on the Red Sea about eight hundred miles south of Port Said. "Tavor said that when he began to think about the thing the caravan route was pretty clear to him.
It's a hundred 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 into the fire. Then he turned abruptly toward me. "And I know where he wanted to live for those six months. The old dream was still with him.
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."
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.
I went back Tavor was up and I sat him down to a cross examination that would have delighted the soul of a Philadelphia lawyer." Barclay paused. "It was all at once that I saw it like you'd snap your fingers. It was an accident of Charlie's talk... one of those obiter dicta, that I mentioned a while ago.
How the man managed to keep on his feet I don't know. "I didn't stop for any explanation. I got Tavor into a taxi, and over to my apartment." Barclay moved in his position before the fire. "But on the way over a thing happened that some little god played in for a joke. There was a block just where Thirty-third crosses into Fifth Avenue, and our taxi pulled up by a limousine."
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