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Updated: June 3, 2025
The muscles in Barclay's big jaw tightened. "Maybe there is a joker that runs the world, and maybe the devil runs it. Anyhow it's a queer system. Here was Charlie Tavor, straight as a string, down and out. And here was Nute Hardman, so crooked that a fly couldn't light on him and stand level, with everything that money could buy. "I cast it up while the taxi stood there beside the car.
"'Tavor says this area of the earth's surface is a great plain practically level, sloping gradually on one side and rising gradually on the other. "'Sand? said Nute. "'No, I replied, 'Tavor says that contrary to the common notion, this plain 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.
"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.
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.
He'd been North to the Kangai where they used to get the gold that the caravans carried across the Shamo, and he'd followed the old trails South to the great wall. "It's all a Satan's country. I don't know why God Almighty wanted to make 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 was after.
Nute was consul in a South American port that you couldn't spell and couldn't find on the map. He didn't have two dollars to rub together, until Charlie Tavor turned up. There he sat, out of the world, forgotten, growing moss and getting ready to rot; and God Almighty, or the devil, or whatever it is, steered Charlie Tavor in to him with the bar silver.
True, Charlie belonged in the other camp, but I didn't. And if I wanted a little favor I felt that the devil ought to come across with it... I put it up to him, or down to him, 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.
"Great people, the English; no fag-out to them. Look how Scott went on in the Antarctic with his feet frozen... It's in the blood; it was in Tavor. "I sat there that winter night in my room in New York while he told me all about it. "It was morning when he finished the milk wagons were on the street, and then, he added, quite simply, as though it were a matter of no importance,
"And there's every ghastly disease in Mongolia.... Still some word always came from Tavor inside of a year; a tramp around the Horn would bring in a dirty note, written God knows where, and carried out to the ship by a naked native swimming with the thing in his teeth; or some little embassy would send it to me in a big official envelope stamped with enough red wax to make a saint's candle.
"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. "Old Nute's thick neck shot out at that. "'Then he did find it? he said.
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