“What were you doing? I didn’t know you were keen on Central Asia.”
“I am to a certain extent. I had a great-great-uncle who was a bit of a rolling stone. He wandered a bit in those parts, and he left a diary, written rather like I write, but you could follow it in parts. I’ll show it you later on. There’s some quaint stuff in it. But it interested me, and last year when I was demobbed after the Armistice, I toddled up there to have a look-see. I was not keen on going back to my old job in Bengal, and, as I’d saved a bit of cash, I thought I’d take a holiday, which I hadn’t really done since I left school. So I trekked off to Kashgar and then east.”
He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a worn pocketbook, and extracted something which he passed across.
“Ever see anything like this?” he queried.
I examined the object closely. A silver coin, new-looking, but rough at the edges. On one side was a mass of Greek lettering. On the obverse was a man’s head, rather clear-cut.
I turned it over again. The names on the coin were unfamiliar, and the head was unlike any coin I knew.
“What country is it, John? It’s Greek, though the lettering is quaint, but whose is the head? It’s not from Greece. Is it one of the funny little new States that the Peace Conference of the war to end war has started to ensure war going on?”
Wrexham looked at me despondently.
“You handle a pen quickly, Harry, but you’re slow sometimes at deductions. Yes, it’s Greek; but it’s a long time since any one wrote Greek quite like that, and I think that the country it came from never heard of the Great War of 1914-18.”
“Antique, is it?” I looked at it again. “It looks fairly new-make. Is it a copy? Central Asia’s full of old Greek relics, I know. Have they started an antique mint in Kashgar in the hope of a tourist boom after the war? Where did you come by it?”