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Authors: Melville Davisson Post

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Warren gave a somewhat different version of the incident. In plain words, he said that he quitted Dorm's camp that night out of fear. He was afraid to remain. He could give no evidential overt act, but he was convinced that his life was in danger. He had a feeling that Dorm did not intend for him to come out alive. It was in the way the man looked at him, Warren said. At any rate, he did leave Dorm's camp in the night, and the majority of the native bearers went with him.

He frankly admitted this, but he denied all knowledge of the gold plates. He had taken nothing except bare necessities. What he had taken in no way reduced either the supplies or the equipment Dorm required for his return.

He said that it was not precisely the fear of death that moved him. It was the fear of the issue that approached between them. Presently, as he saw it, Dorm would make way with him, unless he acted first. He wished to forestall that issue, and the only way open was to cut and run for it. He could not kill Dorm as a preventive measure.

It must be conceded that Dorm's story was the most convincing. He led the expedition, and he had the authority of that leadership. He laughed at Warren's motive. There had been no quarrel, no clash, not even a word or gesture between the two men. Warren had suddenly taken the native bearers and deserted in the night. Dorm shrugged his shoulders. The treasure of the gold plate also was gone. The inference was irresistible. Why so many native bearers if Warren carried nothing out with him?

The circumstantial evidence was convincing. And Warren's suspicions, as he related them, seemed hardly adequate. Decidedly, Dorm had the best of it.

There was a further thing. Dorm said the food supplies left him were mostly tinned stuff that he and Warren had put aside as doubtful. He was afraid to eat it, and he warned the natives. But hunger overcame his warning. They did eat it toward the end of the march, and their disobedience cost them their lives. They died on the last day's march, and Dorm came in alone, very nearly a starved madman, as he described it.

Young Warren stood badly before the world when Dorm came in with his story. He made a rather sorry figure. It was then that this girl, as Dorm put it, deserted Warren, flitted out to Europe with her head up. Most persons regarded him askance.

Dorm had hung about New York for two months, writing his story of the expedition; making his report to the museum, and endeavoring to get young Warren before the criminal courts. I had been out of America for these two months, and now on my return I had this interview with Sir Eric Dorm.

He found decisions suddenly made up. Things delayed, discussed, put off, were now decided—decided against him! And always, as the man's seizure compelled him to believe, it was this girl who influenced events against him. He saw her sinister shadow in the background behind every adverse decision.

She was in the foreground visible to the eye at the interview we were fresh from—the interview with the attorney. She stood beside his table when he gave Dorm his final pronouncement on the criminal feature of young Warren's act. There was no criminal feature!

No ownership could be established in the missing plates, and the circumstantial evidence was too vague for an indictment; besides the act was not within the jurisdiction of our courts.

The thing was clear and ended. Young Warren could not be haled before a criminal court here on the suspicion of a theft in Central Africa.

The great legal authority had brought his hand down heavily on the table, and the girl had smiled, looking at Dorm through narrowed eyelids, as at one vanquished and considered for a triumph.

It was more than Dorm could endure in silence. “And so the thief goes free?” he said.

But the barbed taunt got no entry through her armor. She repeated the sentence as though it were the pronouncement of an oracle. “And so the thief goes free.”

Before the committee at the museum we met the same finality. The matter would not be reconsidered. The commission to Sir Eric Dorm was withdrawn. Going in, we had passed the girl on the stone stairway coming
out. Dorm swore. Was there no end, then, to the influence of a hostile woman?

And here on Long Island, when we came today to get a final answer from the rich American who had financed the first expedition, Dorm received the same denial. This Crœsus was no longer interested in the affair. He shrugged his shoulders, and in plain words he put us out among the hounds and horses of the meet before his door.

He followed, as it happened, but not to soften our dismissal. He came to laugh with this ubiquitous, inevitable girl, sitting her big hunter like some daughter of the gods.

Dorm went forward with his head down and every muscle tense. But I paused to smile and wave a welcome to her. I could not forbear it. She has no equal in the world, as I think.

And now Sir Eric Dorm and I were come to the conclusion of this whole affair, here in the library of this club, alone, on a winter evening. He walked about heavily, like some imprisoned beast. And I stood, as I have written, on the hearth beside the wood fire.

The fire drew my attention, a little flame springing up from a smoldering log, and I put
a query as though the sight of it had aroused my interest. “You had a fire at each night's camp on your African march?”

He answered as though the reply were reflex, as though my idle inquiry did not reach to the deep matter he considered. “Yes,” he said, “a little fire.”

“You carried fuel with you?”

“No.”

“What fuel was to be had on the hardbaked plateau?”

He made a gesture as to dismiss a triviality that disturbed him. “It was hot. We required no fire except to boil a kettle, a few handfuls of the dried desert grasses did that.”

“This would be the only trail of your route then—the dot of these fires?”

“Yes,” he said, “they would remain until the winter rains come.”

Then he faced suddenly toward me, as though he were come up from his consuming introspection with a very determined purpose.

“My friend,” he said, “you must have a conception of truth from evidential incidents, or you would not be representing Sir Henry
Marquis in the affair. Do you think these gold plates were stolen?”

“I do,” I said.

His face cleared. His voice took a firmer note. “You believe that?”

“I know it,” I said.

“Then,” he cried quite impulsively, “why do you not help me to fasten this act on the guilty man? Are you, too, under the spell of this girl?”

I stooped over and warmed my hands above the flame. My hands were not cold, but the gesture led to a question that I wished to appear irrelevant. I put it now in an idle voice. “If a little fire at a camp on your march was meant to boil a kettle, Sir Eric, what would a great fire, at a camp on your march, mean?”

“A great fire!” He echoed the words as though they were a sort of explosive epithet.

I did not look up from my stooped posture. But out of the tail of my eye I could see the changed attitude of the man, as though a great water beast had flung up from the depths to confront an enemy.

I went on, passing in a casual voice to his comment on the girl. “It was not altogether
the mere influence of this girl that decided the museum committee. You see, the gold plates were brought in.” I spoke evenly, with no break, as though to give him no space for comment. “You asked me if I thought they had been stolen. I said I knew it. That is how I knew.”

I stood up. I did not look at the man. I wished my attention to appear diverted. A motor arriving at the door; voices in the hall; two persons going into dinner, helped my purpose.

When I did look at Dorm, he was standing behind the big leather couch, his hand on the table, leaning forward. “And so the thief finally brought them in?” he said. His voice was low and careful, like one who feels about covertly in the dark.

“Well,” I said, “not precisely that, Sir Eric.” I spoke in a large, cheerful manner. “The thief did not bring them in. You see, another expedition went over your route. This expedition brought them in. That would explain the committee's present attitude toward you, and that of Midas here on Long Island. And yet the girl's in it, Sir Eric.”

But he had himself in hand. I give him that due. “Where on Warren's trail out did they find the plates hidden?” he said.

“It was not on Warren's trail out,” I answered. “It was on your trail out.”

I did not look at him. I continued in an even voice: “I asked you a question a moment ago, and you did not answer it: ‘If a little fire was meant to boil a kettle, what would a great fire mean?' You did not answer that, Sir Eric. But the one who took this second expedition over your route did answer it. A great fire had been built at your last camp on your way to the coast, after Warren left you. Why this great fire—grasses gathered up over a large area, with labor, for it? There was a purpose in that.”

I went on: “I could not guess that purpose, Sir Eric. But the one who led this expedition guessed it. The great fire was to cover the fact that the baked earth at this point on your trail had been disturbed—dug up—to bury something of bulk, to bury the gold plates. There had to be a great fire with ashes over six feet of space.”

He kept his posture and his steady voice and
he struck clean to the vital query: “Who led this expedition?”

There is a second door to the library in this club. It looks through a bit of hall to the long dining room. For reply I crossed now and opened this door part way, and through the narrow slit of space we could see the girl and Warren at dinner, at a table toward the drawing-room. Changed to an evening dress, the girl was as lovely as a dream; and the boy beyond her a strong, bronze figure, restored to health.

I closed the door and faced Dorm. “It was this American girl,” I said. “She did not desert Warren in his need. She went to prove him guiltless. She took that second expedition over your trail. She guessed the meaning of that fire at your last camp; she brought in the plates.”

But there was now a light of victory in Dorm's face. “Who would believe her?” he said, “with her interest in Warren. She persuaded him to give the plates up.” He repeated with a sneer. “Who would believe her?”

I looked him squarely in the face. “I would believe her,” I said.

“And why would you believe her?” The sneer and the light of victory remained.

But they died out at my answer.

“Because I was with her,” I informed him with deliberate finality. “Besides”—and I made a trifling gesture—“natives who die from ptomaine poison, Sir Eric, are not found with bullet holes in the skull!”

THE GARDEN IN ASIA


Come to the land where men grind their wheat in the sky
!”

It had come on to rain. Night was approaching, and I was lost. I had been a guest of the Marquis de Brie at the hunt in the southeast of Belgium. The meet at the château had been in the afternoon for the convenience of the guests of the Marquis, who came out from Brussels. It was late before the hounds picked up a fox, and then there had been a mad run.

I was unfamiliar with the country, and by one of those accidents common in the field, I had got separated from the hunt.

There had been a high timber jump. In the take-off my horse slipped, and I feared that he had received a strained tendon. I got down to look, for I valued the horse, and in my concern the field passed. The horse seemed all right. But I was unable again to come up with the hunt, and I was lost.

I set out to return to the château, following that instinct of direction which every man imagines himself to possess. But it was an unfortunate undertaking as is usually the case with these vaunted instincts.

I had the feeling that I passed more than one time through fields that I remembered. At any rate, night was coming on, and a worse thing presented itself. The hunter
had
been injured in that unfortunate timber jump. He began to save his leg a bit—everybody knows the indications.

Of course I was not in a deserted country. There were peasant houses about, and the great windmills—that primitive institution of the flat country, serving the peasant farmer as the mountain torrent served to turn the grist mill of the Virginia settler. Our fathers had big conceptions of the uses of the elemental forces. They harnessed the water and the winds.

But I could get no direction from the Belgian peasant.

The Fleming and the Walloon spoke no language that I could understand; and, of course, English was a simian jabber to them.

I have no idea in what direction I traveled, nor precisely how I came into the road I determined to follow. It was not a highway. It was a sort of lane running along by an immense wood, carpeted with grass and unkempt, for occasionally there was the branch of a forest tree in it.

I had gotten down out of the saddle. It was all the horse could do to limp along, and I at least had two good legs under me.

I walked by the horse's bridle.

The road continued; and presently, in the dim light, I observed that it followed a great fence: a fence of iron spikes as high as a man could reach sitting in the saddle. It was fastened into cement pillars, and it seemed to enclose all the lands off to my right.

I took it to be a great parked estate. The wood beyond the fence was cleared of brush, and I could sometimes see the extension of a meadow. It was beyond question some great estate.

And I took courage from that observation.

There would perhaps be some friend of the Marquis, or at least someone with a knowledge of the hunt, and if I were not put up for the
night, I would at least get some direction that would set me intelligently on the road.

I followed along the great spiked fence, expecting to find an entrance. There would be some way to go in at no inconsiderable distance. But the hope dwindled. We went on—the unused road paralleling the great parked estate, but shut out by this immense, forbidding fence.

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