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“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 that they had picked up a man on the North River docks in an epileptic fit and the only name they could find on him was my New York address. They thought he was going to die, he was cold and stiff for hours, and they had undertaken to reach me in order to identify him. But he did not die. He was up this morning and she would bring him in.”

Barclay paused again.

“She brought in Charlie Tavor! . . . And I nearly screamed when I saw the man. He was dressed in one of those cheap hand-me-downs that the Germans used to sell in the tropics for a pound, three and six, his eyes looked as dead as glass and he was as white as plaster. How the man managed to keep on his feet I don’t know.

“I didn’t stop for any explanation. I got Tavor into a taxi, and over to my apartment.”

Barclay moved in his position before the fire.

“But on the way over a thing happened that some little god played in for a joke. There was a block just where Thirty-third crosses into Fifth Avenue, and our taxi pulled up by a limousine.”

Barclay suddenly thrust out his big pock-marked face.

“The thing couldn’t have happened by itself. Some burlesque angel put it over when the Old Man wasn’t looking. Spread out on the tapestry cushions of that limousine was Nute Hardman!

“There they were side by side. Not six feet apart; Old Nute in a sable-lined coat and Charlie in his hand-me-down, at a pound, three and six.”

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. 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.

“He picked Charlie to the bone and cut for the States. And this damned crooked luck went right along with him. He was in a big apartment, now, up on Fifth Avenue and four-flushing toward every point of the compass. His last stunt was ‘patron of science.’ He’d gotten into the Geographical Society, and he was laying lines for the Royal Society in London. He had a Harvard don working over in the Metropolitan library, building him a thesis!