Page:The council of seven.djvu/102

 Saul Hartz scowled a little. Even when the man on the floor made a long arm and took a box of wonderful Indian inlay work from a tiny table near his elbow and offered it with a smile of rare courtesy, the dubiousness of the visitor was without disguise.

"No pressure," Wygram held out the box with an air of delicious irony. "Quite a free agent, my dear sir."

Like a swimmer taking a plunge into the Serpentine on Christmas morning, Saul Hartz suddenly dipped his fingers among the cigarettes. Moreover, with the faint-smiling aid of his host he lit one defiantly, and what was of even more consequence proceeded to smoke it with an air of slight bravado.

It was a powerful, rare, full-flavored Arabian tobacco. Mumbo jumbo, of course! However, he would humor this trickster, who found it so easy to deceive the world into believing that he was a wielder of occult powers. Nevertheless, a dozen whiffs or so cleared the brain wonderfully. Doubts melted. The mind began to germinate. And the man on the ground in spite of his queer trappings and his feline ways acquired a power, an atmosphere, an authority that Saul Hartz had never before conceded to any human being.

"You suffer from limitations, Mr. Hartz." The fall of the soft syllables had a music beyond anything the Colossus had ever heard.

"We all do, don't we?" he answered, with a first gruff approach to geniality.