riel remembered that she had removed these gloves in order to
turn the slipping key in Bramwell Winton's safe lock.

X.-The Last Adventure

The talk had run on treasure.

I could not sleep and my friends had dropped in. I had the big South
room on the second floor of the Hotel de Paris. It looks down on the
Casino and the Mediterranean. Perhaps you know it.

Queer friends, you'd say. Every man-jack of them a gambler. But when one
begins to sit about all night with his eyes open, the devil's a friend.

Barclay was standing before the fire. The others had drifted out. He's
a big man pitted with the smallpox. He made a gesture, flinging out his
hand toward the door.

"That bunch thinks there's a curse on treasure, Sir Henry. That's one of
the oldest notions in the world... it's unlucky."

"But I know where there's a treasure that's not unlucky. At least it was
not unlucky for poor Charlie Tavor. He did not get it, but there was no
curse on it that reached to him. It helped poor Charlie finish in style.
He died like a lord in a big country house, with a formal garden and a
line of lackeys."

Barclay paused.

"Queer chap, Tavor. He was the best all round explorer in the world. I
bar nobody. Charlie Tavor could take a nigger and cross the poisonous
plateau south west of the Libyan desert. I've backed him. I know... but
he had no business sense, anybody could fool him. He found the stock of
bar silver on the west face of the Andes that made old Nute Hardman a
quarter of a million dollars, clear, after the cursed beast had split it
a half dozen ways with a crooked South American government."

Barclay's teeth set and he jerked up his clinched hand.

"It was a damned steal, Sir Henry. A piece of low down, dirty robbery;
and it was like taking candy away from a child.... 'Sign here, Mr.
Tavor,' and Charlie would scrawl on his fist.. .. Some people think
there's no hell, but what's God Almighty going to do with Old Nute?"

He flung out his hand again.

"Still the thing didn't dent Charlie. He never missed a step. 'Don't
bother, Barclay, old man,' he'd say, 'I'll find something else,' and
then he'd go off into this dream he had of coming back when he'd struck
it, to the old home county in England and laying it over the bunch that
had called him 'no good.' He never talked much, but I gathered from odds
and ends that he was the black sheep in a pretty smart flock.

"Then, I'd stake him to a cheap outfit--not mu