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slobbering won't it, Clements ?"
The secretary licked his lips. It looked for a moment as if at last the
smouldering fires in him would flare up to some reply, and Osman waited for it
hopefully. And then came voices and footsteps on the deck over their heads,
feet clattering down the companion, and the door was opened by a
smart-uniformed Arab seaman to admit a visitor.
It was Galbraith Stride.
" Did you get him ?" he demanded huskily.
There were beads of perspiration on his face, and not all of them were due to
the heat of the day. Osman's puffy lips curled at the sight of him.
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"No, I didn't," he said shortly. "A fool bungled it. I have no time for
fools."
Stride mopped his forehead.
"It's on my nerves, Osman. He's been on the Claudette, admitted who he was who
knows what he'll do next ? I tell you "
"You may tell me all you want to in a few minutes," said Osman suavely. "I
have some business to attend to first if you will excuse me." He turned to the
sea-man. "Ali, send Trape to me."
The Arab touched his forehead and disappeared, and Osman elbowed his secretary
aside and helped himself from an inlaid brass cigarette box on the table. All
his self-possession had returned, and somehow his heavy tranquillity was more
inhuman than his raving anger.
Presently the Arab came back with Trape. Osman gazed at him unwinkingly for
some seconds, and then he spoke.
"I have no time for fools," he repeated.
Young Harry Trape was sullen and frightened. The ways of violence were not new
to him he had been in prison three times, and once they would have flogged him
with a nine-thonged lash if the doctors had not said he was too weak to endure
the punishment. Young Harry had a grievance: he had not only been knocked out
by the Saint and tied up in a stuffy sack, but he had been viciously kicked
both unknowingly and knowingly by the man he had tried to serve, and he felt
he had much to complain about. He had come to the saloon prepared to complain,
but the snake-like impassiveness of the unblinking stare that fastened on his
face held him mute and strangely terrified.
"You are a fool, Trape," said Osman, almost benevo-lently, "and I don't think
I require your services any longer. Ali will take you back to St. Mary's in
the speedboat. You will give up your room at Tregarthen's, make a parcel of
all the cocaine you have and post it to the usual address, and then you will
take yourself, your friend, and your luggage back to the speedboat, which will
take you both to Penzance immediately. Your money will be waiting for you in
London. You may go."
"Yes, sir," said Trape throatily.
He left the saloon quickly. The seaman was about to follow him, but Osman
stayed him with a gesture.
"It will not really be necessary to go to Penzance, Ali," he remarked
deliberately; and the man nodded and went out.
Stride's bloodshot eyes stared at the Egyptian.
'''My God you're a cold-blooded devil!" he half gasped.
Osman chuckled wheezily.
"Oh, no, not cold-blooded, my dear Stride! You ought to know that. Far from
it. But a dead fool is a safe fool, and I believe in safety first. But not
cold-blooded. There are times when my flesh burns like fire have I not told
you?"
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Galbraith Stride shuddered in spite of himself, for he knew what Osman meant.
"I came to see you about that," he said jerkily.
"Ah! You have decided?"
Stride nodded. He sat down at the table, helped him-self with nervous fingers
from the inlaid cigarette box. The secretary stood by, ignored by both.
It was a strange venue for a peace conference, but that was what it was and it
explained also the terror which had come to Galbraith Stride that afternoon on
the sunny deck of his yacht, the terror that had looked at him out of two cold
reckless eyes that were as blue as the sea. Each of those two men was a power
in an underground world of ugly happenings, though in their personal contact
there was no question about which was the dominating personality. Even as
Abdul Osman's tentacles of vice reached from Shanghai to Constanti-nople, so
did Galbraith Stride's stretch from London south to the borders of the
Adriatic and out west across the ocean to Rio.
Looking at Abdul Osman, one could build about him just such a mastery, but
there was nothing about Galbraith Stride to show the truth. And yet it was
true. Somehow, out of the restless cunning that evolved from the cowardice of
his ineffectual physique, Stride had built up that subterranean kingdom and
held it together, unknown to his stepdaughter, unknown to the police, unknown
even to the princelings of his noisome empire, who communicated with him only
through that silent Ramón Almido who passed as Stride's secretary. And thus,
with the growth of both their dominions, it had come to a conference that must
leave one of them supreme. Abdul Osman's insatiable lust for power dictated
it, for Stride would have been content with his own boundaries. And with it,
in the first meeting between them, had come to Abdul Osman the knowledge that
he was Stride's master, that he need not be generous in treating for terms.
The spectacle of Stride's uneasiness was another sop to Osman's pride.
"What a different conclusion there might have been if we had not both
simultaneously thought of depositing the same letters with our solicitors!"
said Osman re-flectively. "To think that if either of us died suddenly there
would be left instructions to the police to investigate carefully the alibi of
the. other! Quite a dramatic handicap, isn't it?"
Stride licked his lips.
"That's the only part of the bargain you've kept," he said. "Why, I've just
heard you admit that your men have been landing cocaine here."
"I took the liberty of assuming our agreement to be a foregone conclusion,"
said Osman smoothly. Then his voice took on a harsher tone. "Stride, there's
only one way out for you. For the last two years my agents have been steadily
accumulating evidence against you evidence which would prove absorbing
reading to your good friends at Scotland Yard. That is the possibility for
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