ch, I've said he could
push through the Libyan desert with a nigger--and he'd drop out of
the world. It wasn't charity. I got my money's worth. The clay pots he
brought me from Yucatan would sell any day for more cash than I ever
advanced him."

Barclay moved a little before the fire. I was listening in a big chair,
my feet extended toward the hearth; a smoking jacket had replaced my
dinner coat.

"It was five years ago, in London," Barclay went on, "that I fitted
Charlie out for his last adventure. He wanted to land in the gulf of
Pe-chi-li and go into the great desert of the Shamo in Central Mongolia.
You'll find the Shamo all dotted out on the maps; but it's faked dope.
No white man knows anything about the Shamo.

"It's a trick to lay off these great waste areas and call them elevated
plateaus or sunken plateaus. You can't go by the atlas. Where's Kane's
Open Polar Sea and Morris K. Jessup's Land? Still, Charlie thought the
Shamo might be a low plain, and he thought he might find something in
it. 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. I suppose a white man's life
is about the cheapest thing there is northwest of the Yellow River; and
Charlie never had an escort. A coolie and an old service pistol would
about foot up his defenses.

"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.

"But the luck failed this time. A year ran on, then two, then three and
I passed Charlie up. He'd surely 'gone west!'"

Barclay paused, thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner jacket
and looked down at me.

"One night in New York I got a call from the City Hospital. The
telephone message came in about ten o'clock. I was in Albany; I found
the message when I got back the following morning and I went ever to the
hospital.

"The matron said