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 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.

“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

“’But I can’t go back, Barclay, old man; my tramping’s over.  That was no fit 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’s baby-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 you don’t get hot . . . you go on and you don’t know what the temperature is.  Then some day, all at once, you go down, cold all over like a dead man . . . 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 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.  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 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.  But I stopped Charlie and went over to the Metropolitan Library; there I got me an expert — an astronomer chap, as it happened, reading calculus in French for fun — I gave him a twenty and I looked him in the eye.