bet I remember it! That was where I had to lay out those fellahin with a pick-handle. Lucky for you I made a side-trip to see what tents were doing in such a wilderness!”
“‘Tisn’t a wilderness! There’s a good well. I never found out why those fellahin wanted to drive me away. I’d paid at least three times what the land was worth, and it wasn’t any good to them for crops or anything. However, an officer came along that afternoon, you remember, and conscripted the lot of them for the labour gang. Arrested you, too, didn’t he, for being in Egypt without a permit?”
“Yes. It meant nothing in his life that permits weren’t being issued in Abyssinia. He took me down to Cairo in a sheep-truck on my own first-class ticket; but go on.”
“Well, you know I get notions. I had a notion to see what could be done with that piece of land. About half the Egyptian babies that survive the flies are either blind or going to be. And I knew a number one eye doctor in Colorado, and I supposed if I should build an eye hospital he’d be keen to run it. It was only after I had hired an architect and had the plans all drawn that I learned he had married a chorus girl and financed a musical comedy on Broadway to provide her with a star part. So that was that. And then I had to come home. There’s oil on my place, you know, and all the sharks in California, and a whole lot more from the East, were trying to get options on the property from my manager. I wish you’d seen the rush when I showed up! I listened to more black-faced lies and blarney in five days than I’d heard even in Egypt, but they got wise finally, and we’ve got the thing going in first-class shape now—rigs and pumps all over the place, and our own pipe-line. Never borrowed a nickel.”
“Who are ‘we’?” I asked her.
“Just me and the manager. I own the whole shooting-match. Well, I kept the title to those acres in Egypt. You couldn’t have sold them for a song. I’d about forgotten that I owned the land, although I left a British ex-Tommy in charge of it, just to see that the Gyppies didn’t steal the holes out of the ground. However, about a month ago along comes this Moustapha Pasha, and wants to buy the land. I thought it funny he should come all that way, when he could have done as well by mail, but I’d have sold him the property for almost any price he’d cared to offer if his lies hadn’t made me suspicious. There wasn’t any sense in them. I asked him out of curiosity what he proposed to do with the property, and he said some friends of his intended to make a hotel out of it!
“You could no more make a hotel out of that place than out of a pig-sty in the sage-brush. Nobody would go there. There wouldn’t be anything to do if they did go there. It’s too far from the railway, too far from the mountains, too far from everybody. When I was using it we had to bring supplies in lorries a whole day’s run, and one of the chief reasons why the British didn’t come and turn me off it was that their red-tape specialists were too lazy to come and argue.
“Well, I refused to name a price, but told this Moustapha Pasha I’d think it over. He got pretty impudent then—tried to tell me that I didn’t know my own business, and that as a foreigner I had no right to own land in Egypt that I couldn’t use, and so on. So I gave him the gate. I said if he wanted to negotiate on that basis he could do it through the courts, or through his embassy, or whichever way Gyppies do their long-range cheating. He went off to San Francisco in a huff.
“Within the fortnight, though, he came back I with a letter of introduction from Mrs. Aintree, whom I once knew slightly. Its terms were far more affectionate and intimate than she’d any right to use to a practical stranger, and I grew more suspicious than ever.
“I asked him what he thought the land was worth, and he hesitated for about a minute, and then said a hundred pounds. Wasn’t that like a Gyppy, to come all that way and then offer five hundred dollars for a thousand acres? I laughed, so he offered a thousand pounds, and then, when I still laughed, five thousand. He had brought the money with him, too. A draft on New York.
“But there’s something about that Gyppy that stirs all the fight in me. His atmosphere suggests a plastered fake. He seems to think he’s talking down to you all the time. I know he’s a faker of some kind, and—”
“Well?”
“I want to ditch the brute! Need help!”
By that time we were running into Reno. A man stepped out under a street-lamp and held his hand up.
“Driving without lights,” he said. “Excuses don’t go. Hell! It’s Joan Angela! Okay. If anyone stops you farther along, Miss Joan, just tell ‘em I said it’s all right!”
“You seem popular,” I suggested.
“If they knew your dad, and liked him, and know you’re on the level, that’s all there is to it,” she answered. “I’m going to this hotel. You’d better come too.”
CHAPTER III
“You talk like the British government”
The hotel was full, but the proprietor surrendered his own suite to Joan, and caused two house-maids, two page-boys, one Chinaman and a darky to sweat furiously. There was nothing whatever to it but friendship—which of course includes respect, or it isn’t of the first water by a long way. There were no strings; I saw her bill next morning. And she was charged four dollars fifty for the use of two rooms, supper and breakfast.
After I had found a place to sleep I returned to the hotel for supper. The proprietor came and sat with us while we tackled a scratch feed that his sister threw together in the absence of the cook. For a while the talk was of folk well known to both of them, and of the ups and downs of local celebrities, all worth recording but not bearing on this tale, unless to show that there is a sort of masonry among old-timers and their sons and daughters that is as a sealed book to all outsiders.
You might cheat such people; in fact it might be easy—once. But for all their open-handed kindness you’d never succeed in being one of them until you’d assayed “honest-to-God” before their eyes—after which it wouldn’t matter whether you were broke or a billionaire; you’d be on the inside, looking out.
“Anybody staying here named Moustapha Pasha?” Joan Angela asked after a while.
“Yes. M. Pasha. Here a week. Some kind of an Ayrab or something—maybe a nabob—seems to think he owns the place because he can pay. Tips the bell-hops half a dollar and expects ‘em to call him ‘Excellency’ or some such bunk. He’s hitched up with a shady gang of lawyers here in town, but I don’t know what the game is. I’d layoff him, if you asked me.”
“Who are the lawyers?”
“Zezwinski and Zoom.”
Joan Angela laughed.
“Zezwinski and Zoom wrote me the other day from their San Francisco office suggesting there’s a flaw in the title to part of my ranch.”
“Is there?” I asked.
“There might have been once,” she answered. “An old friend of my dad’s named Collins called my attention to it. It didn’t mean anything to him, but after we’d talked it over, he gave me a receipt by which he waived for ever any claim that he might have to any portion of my ranch. It’s in my strong-box. Mr. Collins died, and his estate got into the courts. I dare say Zezwinski and Zoom have been hired by some of the heirs to make all the trouble possible, but I didn’t even bother to answer their letter. Suppose you ask Moustapha to come and see me in my room as soon as we’re through supper? I’ll ask Mr. Ramsden to help interview him.”
The proprietor agreed, but hesitated: “Is Mr. Ramsden a lawyer?” he asked.
“No, merely white. He’ll do.”
“All right, Miss Leich, that goes with me. I’ll tell M. Pasha you’d like to see him.”
“And Tom, don’t say anything. I don’t want it all