“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 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.  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.  Barclay replied without moving.

“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 the last 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 the treasure — 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 get into? . . .  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 a practically level plain, and he could get within two miles of it without difficulty in four or five days’ travel from a sea coast town, why couldn’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 a cynical 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 the Atlantic ocean and that gold is in the hold of the Titanic.”

XI.-American Horses

The thing began in the colony room of the Empire Club in London.  The colony room is on the second floor and looks out over Piccadilly Circus.  It was at an hour when nobody is in an English club.  There was a drift of dirty fog outside.  Such nights come along in October.

Douglas Hargrave did not see the Baronet until he closed the door behind him.  Sir Henry was seated at a table, leaning over, his face between his hand, and his elbows resting on the polished mahogany board.  There was a sheet of paper on the table between the Baronet’s elbows.  There were a few lines written on the paper and the man’s faculties were concentrated on them.  He did not see the jewel dealer until that person was half across the room, then he called to him.