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And he was speaking quite reasonably, “Your remarkable success with the first part of the test I made with you, leads me to hope you might be equally fortunate with the rest.”

That was all aboveboard, at least as far as it went. I did believe that I already was on a line which might lead to solving the conclusion of this cryptic sentence and that Mr. Mycroft's crude and superior behavior had just thrown me off the scent. It was really no concern of mine what use—or none—sense or nonsense—my clients made of the readings that I gave them in reply to their riddles.

“Yes, I think I can help,” I said, glancing at the words which were more familiar to me than he imagined. “The time-reference we have already settled, and that part of the clause undoubtedly governs the next word, ‘Cloc.'” I thought he became a little restive at that, but I wasn't going to have my hunch ruined again, and this time by a highly remunerative client. “All that remains, is, then, to settle the last few words. The next two are plain and helpful. Here is obviously a reference to a trail—a mission trail, no doubt. One of those outlier Gospel-raids probably, made by the first Franciscans here.…” (Did he know that I knew that he had gone to the desert?) “I should then freely translate this part of the passage as, ‘On the track of the mission trail.'” I could feel that he was watching me closely. “The remainder of the message gives precise bearings. We have, then, given: one, a definite time, two, a definite route, and, three, the actual spot on that route.” He was dead silent. To relieve what I felt to be an awkward tension I added with some conscious carelessness, “Of course, I'm no seer. It is for the client to apply the reading. I have no idea what the message means but I am glad to be able to tell you that that is what, in point of fact, it says.”

I turned toward him. Yes, he was watching me with a curious nondescript expression—puzzled, I felt, and if certain of anything, then …? Well, perhaps not so friendly as I could wish. He'd been friendly enough till he knew enough? That was my vague, not very reassuring feeling. He remained watching me until I really became quite nervous.

“Well,” I said, rising to break the tension, “that, I think, concludes the matter.”

“No,” he replied with a curious and none-too-pleasant intensity. “You're wrong, every word of it—'cept for the first words you did long ago. I can't have clever theories. I must have facts.”

I was a little frightened, but I was also a good deal more angry. He had hit me where quite a large bruise remained from Mr. Mycroft's unpleasant handling. He was just wanting to get out of paying—well, he could get out. I was sick of the subject, a nauseating mixture of the sinister and the silly—a beaten-up white of egg silliness over some horrid little smear of peril. I heard myself say, “Get out of this office.” I felt it quite out of character but again—as earlier with this odd customer—it worked. He had stood up, looked at the door, then, holding his precious scrap of nonsense in one hand, he rubbed the fingers of the other hand smartly up and down the bridge of his nose till it was quite red.

“Mr. Silchester,” he said, “will you take me along to Miss Brown? Didn't mean to vex you—always was a bit hasty—have a good deal on my mind—can't help feeling that, back of this, there's something worth all whiles to find. Honestly, know enough to bet the reading you gave—very good, I say, very subtle—still it's just not the thing. Do let's see if Miss Brown can see.”

So he really didn't know more than I did, and, on the other hand, he and I shared his feeling that there was really something worth seeing at the bottom of this puzzle. As long as he'd behave, why shouldn't I give the thing one more chance? Then caution and comfort both urged: Leave the whole thing alone!

“No, Mr. Intil,” I said. “I've done my bit and my best. You can again decline to pay. I don't expect you to. Perhaps you can ill afford it. Certainly if that is so you should not bother Miss Brown.”

“You think I can't pay?” he said. “All right; all right.” He was turning over something in his mind, I could see. He looked at me and then I could see he had come to some decision, something, I judged, which cost him some effort. But now that his mind was made up he seemed at his ease, more than I had ever seen him. “I'll trust you,” he said, “if you and Miss Brown will keep my confidence. I have a feeling that people are on my track. I just must get through before I'm forestalled. I can't get this clear by myself—have everything right but can't quite get the precise bearings. I'll promise you two a big fee.” He hesitated. “Two hundred and fifty dollars apiece?” he looked up at me. I bowed quietly and noncommittally. “Five hundred each.” Yes, he evidently had gone very near some goal if that was a serious offer, “If you'll really put yourselves into this decoding. Well, I've trusted you. Will you close with my offer?”

I must say I couldn't get the feel that he was really trusting. But I did get very strongly that he was in a fix and had his finger very nearly on a big thing—just out of his reach.

I made a frontal attack. “What precisely are you, Mr. Intil?” That should bring him out into the open if he really intended leaving cover. And it did, with a rush.

“What am I?” he answered, quite melodramatically. “Well, in a phrase, I'm one of the queer crowd called prospectors. Prospectors, you'll say, why that old '49 stuff? There are none now except those poor crackpot old fellows you'll see off in the Mojave and other of the deserts trailing about behind a couple of burros. There, though, you're wrong. Individual mining days over? Not a bit of it. Though perhaps it's best the public should think they are. Truth is, they're only beginning. Frontiers closed? Nonsense. They're opening as never before. Gold? There you go again down the old trail. Mining's only beginning now, I tell you. But if that's so, what am I doing with a slip of worn paper, trying it over and over? Why am I not out with pick and shovel? Why, there are two good reasons. In the first place, we're in the New Prospecting age. In the old-time mining there was just copper and a hope of tin and, of course, always the silly lure of gold. But the really precious metals or minerals were just coming over the horizon. The really precious metals, haven't you read about them? About Big Bear, colder than Klondike and far richer. What was there? Something that looked like bad coal. What was it? Pitchblende so shot with radium that literally you burnt your seat if you sat on your precious find. Talk of hot money—what about that! Price of radium still makes all the old ‘precious' metals look like junk. And there are”—he paused and eyed me carefully—“bigger and better deposits than Big Bear.” He paused again. “I'm nearly on the track of such a lode and Miss Brown (I have it now firm in my head), with what I give her, can get the line. Now will you take me to her?”

So this was the real story. Well, it fitted in fairly closely with Mr. Mycroft's speculations. And as he had declined to give me his full confidence, I could not help feeling a certain justifiable satisfaction at finding out what he had kept from me. Besides, paying him back was a wrench; and here I should not only “turn a pretty penny,” but I should find what he had held back from me, and, more, what he himself didn't know. I, despised Sydney Silchester, would be there first. That decided me. To be able to write to Mr. Mycroft, in quite a friendly way—I supposed he'd have his mail forwarded to him—and just as a casual piece of news give him the whole story, clue and climax! I own that tempted me too much. Intil was out, it was quite clear, after some rare ore. It wasn't at all likely that it would pan out as he dreamed, any more than it was likely that Mr. Mycroft's dramatic detective rendering of the story was the right one. Intil might well be crazy, but if so, he was the sort that has enough money to be worth humoring. I didn't doubt that Mr. Mycroft might have been sent by some interests which were concerned about getting some sort of new ore. I'd heard that minute amounts—such as of tungsten—could change the quality of steels. There was no need to swallow all the embroidery with which either of the men gave their particular trimming to the tale. The thing was to find the main thread under it and to see that that at least was “a thread of gold”!

“All right,” I said. “If you will provide an advance payment of, say, 50 percent, I'll see whether Miss Brown and I can again work the oracle.”

He did not hesitate. “I'll have the cash here tomorrow for you if you can make the appointment for then.”

I picked up the telephone. Miss Brown was in. “If you will wait in the outer office I will have a word with my colleague. I can give you your answer in five minutes.”

As meek as a schoolboy he said, “Thank you,” and went out, closing the door gently. I certainly had established an ascendancy. The last misgivings in my mind shrank into the background. I felt I had the initiative in quite an entertaining adventure.

“Miss Brown,” I said, “do you remember a Mr. Intil who never paid a fee for the very remarkable sitting you gave him?”

“So the little fellow who bolted has come back?” she answered.

“Yes, he wants another sitting.”

There was silence at the line's other end. If Miss Brown would not help we were done. And though she was stable enough, as good, unpretentious “extrasensory” people usually are before they are spoiled, she of course had to respect what she couldn't control—her subconscious temperament. I knew that, by myself, I couldn't get another word of that damned Scotch-locked code.

“By the way,” I added, “he's already paid us both handsomely—capital and interest—indeed, one could say damages for our past neglected services. And he's prepared to come cash in hand—which is better than ‘cap in hand'—for further help.”

“I wasn't thinking of the pay,” her voice replied, and I could agree that she certainly was not mercenary. “I was thinking whether I could produce.”

“Oh, you can; you've done it already,” I said encouragingly. She had; and I felt sure, if I gave her the assurance she'd do it again and we'd get the whole tangle clear and beat old Mycroft at his own game, and perhaps, who knows, cash out even more handsomely than our present payment promised.

“No, it's not so simple as that. Don't you see, your man interests me—my surface, Miss Brown self—too much. That interferes. As soon as I try to make any sense of what comes through, or, if it has come in trance, then even if I find I'm feeling a recurrent interest or faint curiosity about what may have come through, I'm just fouling my own deep-sea fishing lines.”

All I could do was to answer, “Do try; I'm sure you can get it again.”

“All right,” she said hesitatingly. We settled for three the next afternoon and I went to tell Intil.

“It's touch and go,” I said. “Naturally, sensitives don't like being treated as you have treated Miss Brown.”

He took my rebuke properly enough, only anxious to know whether I'd any hope for him.

“But I think I have persuaded her to give you another chance.” He brightened like a child, and I felt quite the wise elder and not at all unfriendly as I added, “Of course, I must impress upon you that nothing can be guaranteed. On the other hand—” I was pleased to see how judicial I was, and it shot through my mind that it would do Mr. Mycroft no harm to see me carrying out so successfully this role. “On the other hand, I am equally convinced, and I speak with no little experience, that it is highly improbable, most highly, that you will find any other combination”—I smiled at my choice of word—“which can hope to unlock your riddle.” He nodded. “I would then further impress on you to be here precisely at two forty-five
P
.
M
. tomorrow and to bring with you the necessary remuneration.”

He rose quickly. “I'll be here,” he said. “I'll be here and you'll have nothing to complain of this time.” At the door he turned round. “You see, you just see, you get the clue clear and I promise you you'll never have another word, not another word to say again against Thomas Intil.”

The last words were said with such conviction—how shall I put it?—with such unnecessary conviction, that I remained looking at the door after he had gone through it and it had snapped sharply behind him. I felt, in a way, quite sure I had made an impression, felt that he wasn't going to try to shake us off again. He evidently had realized that we were quite essential to him. And then some other line of thought, some further hunch was trying to rise up into my mind. I couldn't think he could be dangerous to us here in a big city, even if he wished—which I didn't believe he did; why should he? After all, Mr. Mycroft's mind ran on murders and mysteries. I knew, now professionally, that many people like their little bit of mystification who'd never dream of violence, far less murder.

All that about old Sanderson was really complete supposition. We really didn't know even that anyone had shot him, that the withered thing we had seen had really been shot or really been Sanderson. I ran over these points again in my mind and the more I thought of it the more likely it seemed that if a hardy field prospector had met poor little Intil plodding after him in his new stiff cactus boots in that hell of a heat it would have been Intil who would have become pemmican, not Sanderson or any pioneer. “And the clue Mr. Mycroft had found in Sandersons house?” my mind asked me in this final check-up. That, I had to own, was far queerer than coincidence. But even here the simpler hypothesis—the anchor of all scientific deduction—was that both Sanderson and Intil could have come upon some record of a cache in the desert—they've often been found and traced before—some deposit left by an old miner, or even a Spaniard's hoard. All the talk about the new prospecting which Intil had shot at me, that, I now concluded, was simply to save his final disclosure for himself. He had to get our help and so put us off with this fantasy about a new mineralogy. That was it: Sanderson, Intil, and maybe the desiccated unknown (who knows?) were all on a common track and they had all, or at least two of them, kept their clue, naturally, to themselves. Neither, I concluded, had found his objective, and probably, too, neither knew precisely what or where it was. Sanderson was at present out of the running. Mr. Mycroft owned that he was stumped by the clue he had furnished himself with from that source. And how funny it would be if, while he was fumbling at it, Sanderson actually came back! A nice point in morality for my magisterial Mycroft: “Go ahead; use someone else's information to lay hands on someone else's property—or own you've been housebreaking and have purloined the owner's title deeds or something near enough to that to make no moral difference.”