“'I'm going to try him,' I said, 'I've got some influence in a quarter that he depends on.'
“And I went out. I went down to my bank and got twenty U. S. bonds of a thousand each. At five o'clock, the professor had his dope ready—the text and the chart, neatly folded in a big manilla envelope with a rubber band around it. And that evening I went up to see old Nute.”
Barclay got another cigarette. There was a queer cynicism in his big pitted face.
“The church bunch,” he said, “have got a strange conception of the devil; they think he's always ready to lie down on his friends. That's a fool notion. The devil couldn't do business if he didn't come across when you needed him.
“And there's another thing; the old-timers, when they went after their god for a favor, always began by reciting what they'd done for him.... That was sound dope! I tried it myself on the way up to old Nute's apartment on Fifth Avenue.
“I went over a lot of things. And whenever I made a point, I rapped it on the pavement with the ferule of my walking stick; as one would say, 'you owe me for that!'
“You see I was worked up about Tavor. When a man's carried a dream over all the hell he'd pushed through he ought to have it in the end.”
Barclay paused and flicked the ashes from his cigarette.
“You know the swell apartments on Fifth Avenue; no name, only a number; every floor a residence, only the elevators connecting them. I found old Nute in the seventh; and I was bucked the moment I got in.
“The door from the drawing room to the library was open. The Harvard don was going out, the one Nute had employed to get up his thesis for the Royal Society of London—I mentioned him a while ago. And I heard his final remark, flung back at the door. 'What you require, Sir, is the example case of some new exploration—one that you have yourself conducted.'