Caves of Terror

E-text prepared by David Clarke, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/)
Meldrum Strange has a way with him. You need all your tact to get him past the quarreling point; but once that point is left behind there isn't a finer business boss in the universe. He likes to put his ringer on a desk-bell and feel somebody jump in Tibet or Wei-hei-wei or Honolulu. That's Meldrum Strange.
When he sent me from San Francisco, where I was enjoying a vacation, to New York, where he was enjoying business, I took the first train.
You've been a long time on the way, he remarked, as I walked into his office twenty minutes after the Chicago flyer reached Grand Central Station. Look at this! he growled, shoving into my hand a clipping from a Western newspaper.
What about it? I asked when I had finished reading.
While you were wasting time on the West Coast this office has been busy, he snorted, looking more like General Grant than ever as he pulled out a cigar and started chewing it. We've taken this matter up with the British Government, and we've been retained to look into it.
You want me to go to Washington, I suppose.
You've got to go to India at once.
That clipping is two months old, I answered. Why didn't you wire me when I was in Egypt to go on from there?
Look at this! he answered, and shoved a letter across the desk.
It bore the address of a club in Simla.
Meldrum Strange, Esq., Messrs. Grim, Ramsden and Ross, New York.