to try him,' I said, 'I've got some influence in a quarter
that he depends on.'

"And I went out. I went down to my bank and got twenty U. S. bonds of
a thousand each. At five o'clock, the professor had his dope ready--the
text and the chart, neatly folded in a big manilla envelope with a
rubber band around it. And that evening I went up to see old Nute."

Barclay got another cigarette. There was a queer cynicism in his big
pitted face.

"The church bunch," he said, "have got a strange conception of the
devil; they think he's always ready to lie down on his friends. That's
a fool notion. The devil couldn't do business if he didn't come across
when you needed him.

"And there's another thing; the old-timers, when they went after their
god for a favor, always began by reciting what they'd done for him....
That was sound dope! 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."

Barclay paused and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.

"You know the swell apartments on Fifth Avenue; no name, only a number;
every floor a residence, only the elevators connecting them. I found old
Nute in the seventh; and I was bucked the moment I got in.

"The door from the drawing room to the library was open. The Harvard don
was going out, the one Nute had employed to get up his thesis for the
Royal Society of London--I mentioned him a while ago. And I heard his
final remark, flung back at the door. 'What you require, Sir, is
the example case of some new exploration--one that you have yourself
conducted.'

"That bucked me; the devil was on the job!"

Barclay stopped again. He sat for a moment watching the smoke from the
cigarette climb in a blue mist slowly into the beautiful fresco of the
ceiling.

"I told old Nute precisely what I've told you. How I'd backed Tavor for
his last adventure, and where he'd been; all over Central Mongolia and
finally across the Great Sandy Desert of El-Khali. And I told him what
Charlie was after; the theory he started with and his final conclusion
when he made his last push along the old caravan route west from Muscat.

"I went into the details, and the big notion that Tav