The Talbot Mundy Megapack. Talbot Mundy

      * * * *

      So Captain Aloysius Ticknor, with nice red tables on his collar and the glow of astuteness radiating from him till he looked like light personified, started out with two dogs at his heels, swinging his service cane. Half an hour later, sweating rather more than he liked, because it offset his studied air of omniscient aloofness, he arrived in front of the Zionist store-shed on the far end of the town.

      The door was locked, but a short, broad-shouldered, sweaty little Jew in black New York-made pants and a gray shirt was busy nailing scrap tin over a broken window-pane.

      “Are you in charge here?” Ticknor asked him.

      The Jew laid down the hammer and eyed his suspiciously. It was no more than hereditary mistrust of uniform because officialdom has always meant oppression for the Jew; but it was enough in itself to stir the lees of Ticknor’s racial arrogance.

      “Can’t you answer? I asked, are you in charge here?”

      “In charge of this hammer, yes. It is not my hammer. I make repairs—see?”

      “Where’s the key of the place?”

      “I have it.”

      “Open the door then.”

      The Jew did not cringe, having left that uningratiating voice behind him in Moscow when he emigrated to America, but he obeyed with alacrity that might have disarmed Ticknor’s suspicion. But Ticknor was feeling jubilant. He had come prepared to hide his real mission under a cloak of friendly interest and was naturally relieved to find that he could lay aside the hypocrisy. There might have been someone there who would have resented intrusion—some Zionist official on his dignity; and of all things in the world that he hated, he worst was having to be polite to people he disliked.

      He walked straight into the great musty-smelling shed the instant the door opened, seeing in imagination a sort of pirates’ stronghold piled full of contraband. But when his eyes grew used to the dim light he saw only very ordinary stores—spare hospital supplies, flour in barrels, clothing in bundles, tar, tools and calico in bales—extremely disappointing.

      However, Jews are secretive and cunning. Doubtless there were rifles hidden in the bales—ammunition in the barrels. He nosed about all over the place, pushing things aside to see what lay behind or underneath them. Presently he found a bale that had been opened and wired up again.

      “Come here, you!” he called. “Here, open this!”

      The overstepped the limit of forbearance even of the individual in black pants. He came in, scratched the back of his head, rubbed his nose and went through the motions with his other hand suggestive of deference and blunt refusal that fought one with the other. A slight shrug of the shoulders indication absence of responsibility; but he said nothing.

      “D’you hear me? Open it!”

      “But why?”

      The answer aroused suspicion to the danger-point. Where prejudice is strong judgment is always weak. Ticknor set to work to do the job himself, twisting at the wires with impatient fingers under the eyes of the bewildered Jew. He had got one wire undone when someone else darkened the doorway.

      * * * *

      “What is this?”

      Ticknor turned impatiently to see a Jew of another type altogether watching him from the door through gold-rimmed pince-nez—the very man he did not want to meet that morning, but for whose benefit he had come prepared with the plausible excuse about the condemned huts. Aaronsohn was one of the intellectuals, a man of considerable private means, journalist and poet, who had thrown his whole fortune and energy into the Zionist movement.

      Caught in the act of trespass without authority, and with dust clinging to the swear on his face and neck, he felt at a disadvantage that Aaronsohn appreciated fully. There seemed nothing for it but to bluff the thing through.

      “Acting on information received,” he said, “I am searching for stolen Government property.”

      “Acting on circumstantial evidence, I am now on my way to General Anthony to lodge a complaint against you,” Aaronsohn answered with a grim smile. “But perhaps you have something in writing?”

      “No need of it,” Ticknor answered.

      “No? We will see about that. Perhaps I had better see first what damage you have done.”

      “Perhaps you’d better open that bale and satisfy me what’s inside it,” sneered Ticknor.

      Aaronsohn obliged him. And because the bale stood wedged between others, which made it awkward to unbind, he and the man in black pants dragged it out to the middle of the floor between them. There proved to be nothing in it but gray flannel shirts, each marked at the neck with the name of a New York manufacturer.

      Aaronsohn chose to be sarcastic, twenty-five years’ use of an acid pen having left that habit on the surface.

      “I will leave you in charge of the plunder,” he said, smiling with thin lips. “Stay here, and let me ask General Anthony to send you assistance.”

      Conscious of the strength of his position, and too old a hand at reprisals to waste invective on a man he could annihilate by much more concrete means, he walked straight out at that, leaving the door wide open.

      Ticknor swore under his breath, reviewing his own position without getting any comfort from it. He knew he might depend on Jenkins to let him down completely, for he was under no delusion as to the brigadier’s method of self-preservation.

      It occurred to him presently that his one meager chance lay in still discovering what he came to find. It might be after all that Aaronsohn’s indignation was a well-acted bluff.

      What had brought the Jew there at that critical moment? What could possibly have brought him there but nervousness? What could have sent him hurrying off to Anthony but the hope of stopping the search before the secret was uncovered.

      Thinking thus, his eye fell on the twelve square feet of floor where the bale had stood before they dragged it clear. He saw hinges—the butt-ends of long strap hinges passing under the next bale on the left.

      “What’s under the floor?” he demanded.

      “Nothing,” said the man in black pants.

      “Drag that next bale away.”

      He helped him do it, and uncovered a trapdoor.

      Hope ran ace-high again. He was the same alert, astute Aloysius Ticknor who had started forth that morning dreaming of high politics. Even his two dogs, sniffing for rats in a corner, seemed to appreciate the change, for they left their pressing business to come and wag their tails at him.

      “Open her up!” he ordered.

      Might as well be broke for burglary as trespass. Besides, all successful men take chances.

      But the trapdoor would not raise. It was fastened down with one long nail driven in to the head. The man in black pants produced a crowbar from a corner and lent the strength of his stocky shoulders.

      “I’ll remember that in your favor,” said Ticknor, not supposing that the Jew’s readiness to help might be due to anything but the instinct of self-preservation.

      Some men can convince themselves of anything they want to believe. Ticknor would have betted a year’s pay that minute on there being loot under the floor, and another year’s pay on top of that that both Aaronsohn and this man knew it.

      So he was not surprised, he was merely elated and self-complacent when the nail came splintering out of the wood and the door creaked back at last. He did not stop to consider why the hinges should have yielded so reluctantly, or to study the rust on the ancient nail. There was too much down below to interest him—rifles, cartridges, revolvers, bayonets—the plunder of months from Ludd encampment!

      That was a minute of triumph, worth ten times the sting of Aaronsohn’s