Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 146: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

140 and because Nolak was just about the last place on earth where any one would want to go. Of these three, John Eade, wool mer- chant of New York and Melbourne, was one; and of the other two, the first was a little French lady, and the second, a fat man, short of both sight and breath, who could never have been anything else but a German. In the offices of an old established firm of New York solicitors it had been sug- gested that Eade should go himself to Malaya in search of a more or less dis- reputable younger cousin who, having inherited a moderate fortune for the third time in his life, was nowhere to be found. From certain rubber estates in both Perak and Johore, a tin dredging company in Singora, from even a poste-restante ad- dress in Pulo Penang, it was not possible to learn anything of Charles Cart- wright’s whereabouts. He was believed to have left the Malay Peninsula alto- gether, since he had been neither seen nor heard of for months. Eade, who had undertaken to find the young reprobate if he could, was per- sonally interested in the winding up of a maiden aunt’s’estate, and as he was going to Melbourne in any case, had de- cided to take in Singapore en route. There had never been any real harm in Charles. Eade remembered him well as a boy at college. Strong, good looking and a fine athlete, Cartwright had suffered perhaps from overpopularity. He had al- ways been too ready to make both friends and enemies. A rowdy young devil, he had never cared two straws whether he spent his money or used his fists—the very type to prefer a precarious, happy-go- lucky existence, knocking around the world, to anything in the way of a con- ventional, settled life. And from all accounts, he had made things hum in the Malay States, before he had had a free fight with his boss on the Sunchor Rubber Estate in Perak. A day or so after that incident, Charles had put in an appearance at Ikey’s Bar in Sing- CHARLES GILSON apore, where he had stood drinks all round. And that was the last that had been heard of him. Suddenly and un- accountably, he had just disappeared, as men sometimes do in the East. ADE was inclined to believe that his cousin was dead. In any case, he very much doubted whether he would ever get any news of him. And then, the very day he arrived in Singapore, he heard that the missing man was alive. Charles had turned up about a week before, looking pale and haggard, as if he had been having a thin time of it. No one could say where he had been, or what he had been doing. For once in his life he kept his business to himself; though all his friends remarked that he looked an altered man. Anyway, with his usual luck, he dropped straight on to a new job, for, knowing nothing of his aunt’s death, he believed that he hadn’t a dollar in the world. Nolak wasn’t the sort of place any one would choose; but Cartwright, who was admitted to be one of the best men with natives in the country, had been glad enough to take the first chance that offered. As for Eade, having come a good two thousand miles out of his way, he thought he might as well see the business through. His cousin had gone up-country to one of the most inaccessible places in all Malaya; but in Raffles’ Hotel he ran across a German rubber expert, of the name of Gottheimer, who had got a passage to Nolak on the Yalai, on board a kind of tramp.paddle-boat that was owned and skippered by a Portuguese. This Port- uguese, a Ferfiao Quental, had been pottering about the islands for years, and had long been suspected of having a per- sonal interest in the smuggling carried on by the Chinese and Japanese. He wasan ugly little fellow, this Quental, with a parchment colored face and no hair, as proud of the glorified ferryboat he owned as if it were a man-o’-war. Gottheimer and Eade went aboard at midday; and an hour or so afterward the lady herself turned up. She had evidently comicloooks.com