by Talbot Mundy
But she could see nothing worth finishing about Zezwinski. “He was never a friend of mine, and I never trusted him,” she answered. “It was all my fault. I shouldn’t have trusted Clara. I knew she was inclined to be sly in some ways, but I thought that would thaw out of her in time. I guess she was tempted too far. We’ve got no right to leave temptation in people’s way. Left to herself, I think she would have resisted it, but she met that Mrs. Aintree. Mrs. Aintree had been at the ranch quite often when I was away — six or seven times during the past month. And Clara was so fond of the comfort that money brings that she was willing to lend herself to that meanness — think of it! What is the matter with you and me, Will? You always mistrusted Clara; you never said so, but I knew you did, and I resented it. I never thought an awful lot of Fritz, and you didn’t like my doubting your judgment. Now you feel as mean about Fritz as I do about Clara. What is the answer?”
“Lord knows!” said Will. “But I know when I’m through with a man, and it don’t take him long to discover it either.”
That was evidently meant for a dig at Joan, and it drew the first laugh from her that morning. Perhaps that was what he had intended, for he smiled back; but a second later he was frowning again.
“I see she’s coming up here,” he said discontentedly. “There’s no way of giving her the slip — !”
Clara came, looking her prettiest, riding one of Joan’s bay Arab ponies, smiling through her tears, but dressed to kill in a glove-fitting grey riding suit. She let the pony go, and came and flung herself beside Joan Angela, face-downward, and then presently looked up with her chin resting on both hands. My guess was that she had thought out that pose in advance, but perhaps I was wrong, for prejudice warps my judgment as surely as sun on the foresight spoils my aim. I started to move away, and so did Will, but Joan shook her head and we both sat down again.
“Are you going to forgive me, Joan?” asked Clara Mulready.
She was plenty good to look at, and if she was acting a part she was doing it perfectly. I didn’t envy Joan her job, but Joan wasn’t thinking about herself.
“Clara, you don’t know what forgiveness means.”
“You forgave that robber, Joan — the man who held you up that night when you were driving through the mountains all alone.”
“He wasn’t my friend in the first place. There was very little forgiveness that he needed. A chance—”
“Give me a chance!”
“Didn’t I give you all the chances? I gave you too many, Clara. Do you expect me to forget that-”
“Yes, I do! You can forget anything — anything! Why should you remember my part of it, and care nothing at all about what the others did? You’re not even angry with that pig Zezwinski. You don’t care about Fritz; you’ve forgotten him already. Mrs. Aintree doesn’t even interest you. Why should you blame me for the whole of it?”
“I don’t believe I blame you, Clara. I think perhaps I’m just disappointed. I would do anything, anything, if I could only put you back where you were; but all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t do that, Clara.”
“Oh, Joan, you couldn’t cast me off like an old shoe!”
“Of course not. But, you see, Clara, you’re no different now to what you were when we first made friends. All along — all the time you’ve been living here — you’ve had treason at the back of your mind. That must be, or you wouldn’t have listened to Fritz and Mrs. Aintree.”
“Well, if that’s so, Joan, I’ve got rid of it! I’ve cast it out! Joan dear, I’ve been through hell all night long. I couldn’t sleep for crying.”
I could have believed that of Joan Angela, but not of her.
“Call me your friend again, and I’ll be the truest and loyalest friend that ever lived! You see, Joan, it isn’t as if the trick had succeeded; there was no real harm done.”
Joan Angela made a gesture between amusement and despair-nothing cynical about it.
“I don’t think you can imagine it, Clara, but I would rather have had Zezwinski succeed than learn that you were not my friend.”
“Joan, I am your friend! I am! I am! I’ll prove it. I’ll die for you. I’ll do anything.”
She broke down utterly and sobbed for several minutes.
“You mustn’t cast me off! I won’t go! I’ll your—”
“Clara, I wouldn’t dream of doing that. You may stay here as long as you wish. Only, you mustn’t deceive yourself about it. I dare say you have learned a terrible lesson, but so have I.”
“You mean, we’re just acquaintances? Oh, Joan!”
Joan Angela leaned down and kissed her.
“There. You go back to the house, Clara, and wash away those tears, and play some music, and try to forget it. We three are going to stay here and talk.”
Clara Mulready obeyed without another word, not understanding anything, I think, except that she had not been banished away from Easy Street. She did not look back, but caught her pony and rode away down-hill with her head drooping and her handkerchief to her eyes.
“Now, for goodness sake,” said Joan Angela, “let’s talk of something else before I break down and make an exhibition of myself!”
“Let’s talk Egypt,” I suggested. “What are you going to do about that thousand-acre lot of yours in the Fayoum?”
“Zezwinski and Zoom wanted it mighty bad,” said Tryon. “Mrs. Aintree seems to have her eye on it. So does this Egyptian dude I haven’t met. I’d watch my step, if I was you, Joan.”
“Mrs. Aintree,” I said, “is ‘a poor thing but her own’. She has ambition, but can’t see straight and keeps out of jail by a string of lucky accidents. If you put a thousand dollars in the middle of an empty lot, she’d tunnel underneath two blocks to get it. Somebody else would get there first, of course, and she’d blame that on human depravity. But she’d be dead sure the thousand dollars was there before she laid her plans to dig, so it’s a safe bet there’s something in this Egyptian business.”
“Why not send one of the boys out to look the place over?” Will Tryon suggested. “There’s two or three would like a chance to travel, if they knew their jobs were waiting for them when they came back.”
That gave me my opportunity, and I cut loose. “This looks like a case for Grim, Ramsden and Ross,” I said. “From what Zoom told me in Reno, I suspect they’re planning to commit crime in Egypt and to get away with it on the strength of pull in the United States. That’s where Strange comes in. He turns us loose regardless of expense, and as we are known to have no political irons in the fire we get a rather free hand.”
“What would you have me do, then?” Joan asked.
“Use your own judgment,” I answered. “You wanted to buy our firm the other day from Meldrum Strange! You don’t have to buy a car in order to ride in one, though I grant that you did.”
“‘Tell you what,” said Tryon. “‘Ramsden is a man who’ll play straight. Why not give him a lease on that Egypt property on a percentage basis? That way you’ll keep control, and get what’s coming to you, if there really is anything in it. Turn that over in your mind, Joan Angela.”
“What I’m turning over in my mind is a trip to Egypt,” she answered. “I don’t care for making anything out of that property, but I’m curious to know why others should believe it so valuable. Ramsden, if Meldrum Strange will take this thing up I believe I’ll lend a hand! Moustapha Pasha ought to be ditched; it’s a duty!”
“So ought Mrs. Aintree to be ditched,” I answered.
“Oh, hell!” Will Tryon groaned. “I had a hunch this affair was going to lead to a mix-up! Let it alone, Joan Angela! Let it alone, for God’s sake! Give Jeff Ramsden a lease, and let it go at that. You stay here, young lady, where the cream’s good, and where the worst that happens is a gun shoved against you on a dark night. That’s clean danger. Let those damned ‘Gyptians alone. That’s my advice.”
But Joan Angela doesn’t like doing things by proxy. Her friendship and her enmities are firs
t-hand affairs, and she is as direct as some other folk are crooked.
“I’ll go to Egypt,” she said quietly, looking out over the valley as if she could see the Nile in the distance.
“You’re looking due west,” laughed Tryon, “you don’t mean going that way round?”
“Maybe. Might. What’s the difference?” she answered. “Jeff Ramsden, do you speak for Meldrum Strange?”
“Within clearly defined limits, yes.”
“Will your firm look into this?”
I nodded.
“It’s a bet, then! Will, I’m going! I’ll meet you in Cairo, Jeff, soon as I can get cleaned up here.”
It was the first time she had ever called me by my first name without adding the other. In some way, without her exactly knowing it, and certainly without my deserving it, I had dropped into Clara Mulready’s empty place; for Joan Angela is a woman who would wither up and die, like a flower without its petals, if her huge capacity for friendship could not find lodgment somewhere. She seems to me less sentimental than most women; her friendship does not depend on close quarters or constant intercourse, but it’s like a rock when she has once placed it. It stays put. She demands nothing of you, except loyalty.
“Give me an option on your Egyptian property,” I said. “Give me a twelve months’ option for one dollar, and have Tryon write in any terms he cares to. You can have it back whenever you say, but I want it in my pocket for a while.”
They both agreed instantly to that, but I laughed that afternoon when Tryon produced the document. It covered four foolscap pages, and protected his young employer’s interests in a score of ways that not even the wiliest old claim-swapper would ever have foreseen. I had an option, sure enough, and price one dollar, as agreed; but even if I should exercise it, and afterwards discover a billion dollars on the property, Joan Angela would still have had the control, and ninety per cent of the billion. I liked that man Will Tryon. I have kept on liking him better every time we meet. There’s something about real loyalty to an employer that ennobles a man in my judgment, and all the more since there’s such a lot of the imitation stuff parading itself for praise.
I caught the train that night at Sacramento, and was in Reno by eleven o’clock. Reno is one of those places where they eat at 6 p.m. and get to bed as soon as the movies are out, but your Egyptian is not so constituted, and, like the leopard, needs a few thousand centuries in which to change his spots; so it was no surprise to find him at that hour sitting in the hotel lobby, very nearly melancholy mad, and being watched suspiciously by a sleepy porter.
He was positively relieved to have somebody to quarrel with, and demanded that I follow him to his room at once.
“You sure ain’t goin’ to waste good liquor on that heathen?” the porter asked me in a stage aside. “He’s one o’ these here ar-is-tocrats. Have you heard of a horse’s ‘hime-end.’”
However, it was the porter’s job to run the elevator on demand, and I followed the Egyptian to his room.
“Now,” he said, throwing himself into a rocker, “we two can talk business. Eh? You’re on the lookout for number one like any other Yank-or should I have said dam-Yank? You seem to know that Leich girl. Perhaps you know her pretty intimately? Eh?”
Don’t you enjoy listening to that kind of insolence?
“Go ahead,” I told him. “Sure, I know Miss Leich.”
“I’ve been what you dam-Yanks call stung. That brute Zoom is laughing at me. He and his partner Zezwinski played me a fine trick. I paid them fifty thousand dollars for a claim to part of a certain estate, and now Zoom tells me the claim isn’t worth ten cents! The swine said it was a client of theirs who sold me the claim, but I don’t believe a word of it; they pocketed my money, curse them! And I have nothing to show for it but a receipt that another lawyer told me this afternoon isn’t worth the paper it is written on! That’s America for you! That’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity-in God we trust — e pluribus unum! That’s your screaming eagle, and your home of the brave! Home of shabby robbers and shameless women, that’s what this is!”
“Undoubtedly you manage those things much better in Egypt,” I answered. “What do you propose to do next? Fight Zezwinski and Zoom?”
“Gr-r-r-yah! Sittin kilab! [] I have lost fifty thousand e pluribus unums; they have them, and that is all about it. Ma-alesh! I am not a rag- picker; I snap my fingers!”
“What then?”
“I return to my main objective.”
He glared at me for a moment with the helpless venom of a beast in a trap. He knew he was helpless, and yet hoped to spit and spite his way out somehow.
“I will either get what I came for, or else make it useless to that Leich woman! I could do that easily! However, I will try the former first. In this land of free robbers there is only one argument that has weight. You listen to the chink of money, and to nothing else — unless it is to the man who makes moonshine whisky, and him you pay as if he were the tax-gatherer! Bah! What a rotten county is this America! What thieves! What hypocrites! Fifty thousand dollars, eh! Well, we will see who laughs last! Now, I will talk dollars to you; that is a language that you will understand!”
“I’ll try,” I said. “‘I’m no great linguist. My vocabulary in that language is decidedly limited.”
“You know that Leich woman intimately, don’t you? Get me the title to that Egyptian land she owns, and I will pay you anything in reason.”
“How much, for instance?”
“I am short of cash. Those swine of lawyers have cost me nearly the whole amount of my letter of credit. If it comes to paying her a large sum for the property I shall have to cable for more funds. Allah! You are a Yankee, are you not? Can’t you trick her out of it? See here, if you will get me that property for a thousand dollars, or two thousand dollars or so, I will give you a ten per cent interest in it, and you will have made your fortune! Take it from her! She has too much money. I have no compunction whatever in depriving such a wealthy female of something that she does not know how to use!”
“If the land is as valuable as all that, and if I could get it from her, I’d be a fool to part with it to you for ten per cent,” I answered. “You’re not talking business.”
“Am I not? You listen to me! You couldn’t use that property. Neither you nor she could use it! Even supposing you could discover the secret of its true value, you would be helpless; for, believe me, I am not a man to be laughed at free of charge! Not in Egypt I am not! Here, these swine of lawyers can take my money and tell me to go to hell; but there, not so! Over there I am a personage — a man of influence, I can assure you.”
He looked down at his beautiful silk socks, gathered a sort of courage from them, and continued:
“I am willing to be blind, of course. I understand business. You tell me how much you are supposed to pay that woman, and I will not make too close inquiries. If the sum is not outrageous, I will pay it. Go to her as a friend and offer to buy those thousand acres of desert that she owns in Egypt. Offer her a song for it. Say that you wish to own real estate there in order to bring suit as a resident, instead of as a foreigner. Say anything, but get that property for me!”
“What would you say to an option on it?” I suggested.
“For how long?”
“Twelve months.”
“Let me see; twelve months? That might do. An option to purchase at the end of twelve months? Yes, that is a clever idea. Being a woman, she would give an option and deceive herself into thinking that she still controlled the property. Yes, that is better; get an option, and pay her very little for it!”
“I have one in my pocket now,” I said. “See here.”
And I pulled out the paper and displayed it.
“Mashallah! So you are a true Yankee, aren’t you! Is it witnessed? Ah!” He looked down at his beautiful socks again, and polished his nails on his sleeve. “Well. That is worth nothing to you, but a very great deal to me. I will buy it from you. What will you take? I offer you t
en per cent.”
“You might cheat me,” I suggested.
“I? I would not even cheat an enemy! I will deal honourably with you. Listen! Those dirty dogs Zezwinski and Zoom were drawing up papers of Incorporation for a Nevada company to own and work that property. They assured me a Nevada company can own property in Egypt. Now what we can do is to go ahead with that incorporation — employ another firm of lawyers and let Zezwinski and Zoom rot where they sit — and I will give you ten per cent of the shares in it in exchange for that option. Your shares will be worth at least a million dollars in one year’s time!”
“At that rate the whole would be worth ten million,” I answered. “What kind of idiot do you take me for?”
“You will be an idiot if you refuse to listen to me! You will throw away a million dollars for the sake of the money-hunger that burns in your Yankee breast! One word from me in the right quarter and that whole property is worth nothing to you!”
“You’d have to explain that before I’d attach much weight to the mere assertion,” I answered.
He looked at me for about thirty seconds from under lowered eyelids — the long-lashed Egyptian eyelids that have been the wonder of the stranger ever since Abraham’s descendants went to Egypt and got stung. They are as attractive as a houri’s; deceitful as fame itself.
“In the first place,” he said, speaking with his tongue close to his teeth-beautiful white teeth so that the words rasped, “if you were to go to Egypt with that option in your pocket, it would be disputed. There would be litigation and an injunction and the year would expire before you could do anything. In the second place, your life would be decidedly in danger. You know Egypt a little, I believe. You appreciate, then, that it is a land in which death is not difficult to attain. But life has its complexities. Eh? Its risks. You understand me?
“In the third place, failing what is euphemistically termed the act of God, there is the law of Egypt, which is strictly drawn and not to be avoided without skilful and strong influence in high places. In the fourth place — in order that our argument may be four-square, my friend, and you may not delude yourself — as I have already told you, one word from me and the whole value of that property goes up in smoke! I am a man so constituted by heredity, and so convinced of what is due to me, that I would not hesitate to prevent another from getting what I have set my mind on having. I would certainly destroy its value rather than see another enjoy it. So, you see, you are helpless in spite of that paper in your pocket.”
