This speech, delicately suave though it was, yet stung the visitor to words of his own. “What little matters?” he asked, with a sense of irritation that he knew to be illogical.
“When busy men seek me out,” was the answer, “they desire guidance, as a rule, in things beyond their ken ... things which have suddenly, unexpectedly, even terribly obtruded themselves upon their daily lives.”
Curtly, Saul Hartz agreed. This cunning quack was fishing for a clue to the business which had brought him there.
“You are under no obligation to take me into your confidence.” The voice was charming. “There was no compulsion for you to come here at all. And now you are here, you deplore your boldness. The dilemma is quite intelligible. One even sympathizes with it. But there is a short way out, if you will but consent to take it.”
“Very glad, if you’ll find one for me,” said Hartz, in a voice that was half a growl.
“Nothing simpler. Smoke one of my cigarettes and I guarantee that your path shall grow magically clearer.”
Saul Hartz scowled a little. Even when the man on the floor made a long arm and took a box of wonderful Indian inlay work from a tiny table near his elbow and offered it with a smile of rare courtesy, the dubiousness of the visitor was without disguise.
“No pressure,” Wygram held out the box with an air of delicious irony. “Quite a free agent, my dear sir.”
Like a swimmer taking a plunge into the Serpentine on Christmas morning, Saul Hartz suddenly dipped his fingers among the cigarettes. Moreover, with the faint-smiling aid of his host he lit one defiantly, and what was of even more consequence proceeded to smoke it with an air of slight bravado.
It was a powerful, rare, full-flavored Arabian tobacco. Mumbo jumbo, of course! However, he would humor this trickster, who found it so easy to deceive the world into believing that he was a wielder of occult powers. Nevertheless, a dozen whiffs or so cleared the brain wonderfully. Doubts melted. The mind began to germinate. And the man on the ground in spite of his queer trappings and his feline ways acquired a power, an atmosphere, an authority that Saul Hartz had never before conceded to any human being.