“I want to ask you a few questions,” he says. “A thousand, if you wish. I would do anything for you, Aleck. Again you have saved my life.” “How?” demands the Canadian. “Only for you I should perhaps have been fool enough to have attempted that climb on the wheel. I am in poor condition to-night, and ten to one I would have lost my grit and my grip. Then they’d have swept me up below, and poor Wycherley would have been a bursted bubble, a back number. So I feel awfully grateful to you. Ask me any favor and I’ll put myself out to do it--anything but giving you a tip on the market. That’s a dead secret yet--my plans are not quite perfected. If I win that million now----” “Hang the million! What I want to know concerns that part of your story in which the Chicagoan brought his Georgian wife--stolen from the Turkish pasha--to this place.” “All right. What I know is at your service. As I learned it from his royal nibs, Scutari, of course I’m in the dark wherever he is.” “I realize that,” returns Aleck slowly; “but perhaps I may unearth some fact that will help me to solve this question. You told me the lovely Marda died a year or so after reaching Chicago.” “So Scutari said and swore to.” “Yet the daughter knows nothing concerning her mother. Why should Samson Cereal desire to keep the facts from her if there was nothing to conceal?” “Look here, you’re probing this thing like a lawyer. You go beyond me. I deal in facts, and never worry about the reasons back of them. What are you getting at--didn’t Marda die?” “Ah! that is what I am unable to say. It is a secret that perhaps only Samson Cereal could explain. As to myself, without any positive proof to back my theory up, I have a notion that all these years the old manipulator of wheat has deceived his daughter.” “Confusion! I say, you strike hard, Cannuck.” “That Marda is not dead.” “Bless me! what puts such a strange notion into your head, my _dear_ fellow?” “I believe I have seen her.” Craig smokes his cigar while delivering these sledge-hammer blows. He really enjoys the astonishment of his companion, for generally Wycherley is proof against such assault. “The plot thickens. It was a great hour when I ran across you, Aleck Craig. When do you think you saw Samson’s Georgian wife, and where?” “In this street of Cairo, to-night. Plainly, Claude, that was why I was so anxious to learn if you had seen the face of the fortune teller.” At this the nomad assumes an attitude that is a revelation concerning his ability as an actor. Strange that the world failed to properly appreciate him. “Great Scott! you don’t mean it--and the pasha---- Why, I’m already half convinced. He suspected--but see here, how could it be that Marda living would appear dead all these years? Incredible!”