I sat up in my big lounge chair.
“Didn't Hardman make a fight for them; if he didn't find the treasure—didn't he squeal?”
Barclay turned about, drawing the curtain close behind him.
“And be laughed out of the high-brow bunch that he was trying to get into?... I said old Nute was a crook, but I didn't say he was a fool.”
I turned around in the chair.
“I don't understand this thing, Barclay. If the treasure was there, and you gave Hardman a correct map of the route to it, and it lay on a practically level plain, and he could get within two miles of it without difficulty in four or five days' travel from a sea coast town, why couldn't he get it? Was it all the truth?”
“It was every word precisely the truth,” he said.
“Then why couldn't he get it?”
Barclay looked down at me; his big pitted face was illumined with a cynical smile.
“Well, Sir Henry,” he said, “'the trouble is with those last two miles. They're water... straight down. The level plain is the bed of the Atlantic ocean and that gold is in the hold of the Titanic.”