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.
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