“How long were you on that spree?” I asked.
“Which?” he twinkled.
“Before you came to and had but eleven thousand dollars left,” I
explained.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I didn’t know anything I had been doing.”
“I can tell you one thing you did,” I said.
“What?” he queried.
“You put four packets, each of one hundred hundred-dollar bills, in a
thin manila clasp-envelope, directed it to a New York lawyer and mailed
the envelope to him with no letter in it, only a half sheet of dirty
paper with nothing on it except: ‘Keep this for me until I ask for it,’
and the signature you have just written.”
“Honest?” he enunciated incredulously.
“Fact!” I said.
“Then you believe what I’ve told you,” he exclaimed joyfully.
“Not a bit I don’t,” I asseverated.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“If you were drunk enough,” I explained, “to risk forty thousand
dollars in that crazy way, you were drunk enough to dream all the
complicated nightmare you have spun out to me.”
“If I did,” he argued, “how did I get the fifty thousand odd dollars?”
“I’m willing to suppose you got it with no more dishonesty on your
part,” I told him, “than if you had come by it as you described.”
“It makes me mad you won’t believe me,” he said.
“I don’t,” I finished.
He gloomed in silence.
Presently he said:
“I can stand looking at him now,” and led the way to the cage where
the big blue-nosed mandril chattered his inarticulate bestialities and
scratched himself intermittently.
He stared at the brute.
“And you don’t believe me?” he regretted.
“No, I don’t,” I repeated, “and I’m not going to. The thing’s
incredible.”
“Couldn’t there be a mongrel, a hybrid?” he suggested.
“Put that out of your head,” I told him, “the whole thing’s incredible.”
“Suppose she’d seen a critter like this,” he persisted, “just at the
wrong time?”
“Bosh!” I said. “Old wives’ tales! Superstition! Impossibility!”
“His head,” he declared, “was just like that.” He shuddered.
“Somebody put drops in some of your drink,” I suggested. “Anyhow, let’s
talk about something else. Come and have lunch with me.”
Over the lunch I asked him:
“What city did you like best of all you saw?”
“Paris for mine,” he grinned, “Paris forever.”
“I tell you what I advise you to do,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked, his eyes bright on mine.
“Let me buy you an annuity with your forty thousand,” I explained, “an
annuity payable in Paris. There’s enough interest already to pay your
way to Paris and leave you some cash till the first quarterly payment
comes due.”
“You wouldn’t feel yourself defrauding the Eversleighs?” he questioned.
“If I’m defrauding any people,” I said, “I don’t know who they are.”
“How about the fire?” he insisted. “I’ll bet you heard of it. Don’t the
dates agree?”
“The dates agree,” I admitted. “And the servants were all dismissed,
the remaining buildings and walls torn down and the place cut up and
sold in portions just about as it would have been if your story were
true.”
“There now!” he ejaculated. “You do believe me!”
“I do not!” I insisted. “And the proof is that I’m ready to carry out
my annuity plan for you.”
“I agree,” he said, and stood up from the lunch table.
“Where are we going now?” he inquired as we left the restaurant.
“Just you come with me,” I told him, “and ask no questions.”
I piloted him to the Museum of Archæology and led him circuitously to
what I meant for an experiment on him. I dwelt on other subjects nearby
and waited for him to see it himself.
He saw.
He grabbed me by the arm.
“That’s him!” he whispered. “Not the size, but his very expression, in
all his pictures.”
He pointed to that magnificent, enigmatical black-diorite
twelfth-dynasty statue which represents neither Anubis nor Seth, but
some nameless cynocephalus god.
“That’s him,” he repeated. “Look at the awful wisdom of him.”