The man looked at her keenly.
“What do you mean precisely?” he replied.
“I mean,” she continued, “something that would bring one fame and fortune if one found it.” And she added, as a bit of lure, “You remember the gold plates Hector Bartlett dug up in Syria?”
He came over closer to her; his little eyes narrowed.
“What have you got?” he said.
His facetious manner—that vulgar persons imagine to be distinguished—was gone out of him. He was direct and simple.
She replied with no attempt at subterfuge.
“I've got a map of a route to some sort of treasure—I don't know what—It's in the Karamajo Mountains in the French Congo; a map to it and a water color of the thing.”
Hecklemeir did not ask how Lady Muriel came by the thing she claimed; his profession always avoided such detail. But he knew that she had gone to Bramwell Winton; and what she had must have come from some scientific source. The mention of Hector Bartlett was not without its virtue.
Lady Muriel marked the man's changed manner, and pushed her trade.