done since I left school. So I trekked off to Kashgar and then east.”

[8]

He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out a worn pocketbook, and extracted something which he passed across.

“Ever see anything like this?” he queried.

I examined the object closely. A silver coin, new-looking, but rough at the edges. On one side was a mass of Greek lettering. On the obverse was a man’s head, rather clear-cut.

I turned it over again. The names on the coin were unfamiliar, and the head was unlike any coin I knew.

“What country is it, John? It’s Greek, though the lettering is quaint, but whose is the head? It’s not from Greece. Is it one of the funny little new States that the Peace Conference of the war to end war has started to ensure war going on?”

Wrexham looked at me despondently.

“You handle a pen quickly, Harry, but you’re slow sometimes at deductions. Yes, it’s Greek; but it’s a long time since any one wrote Greek quite like that, and I think that the country it came from never heard of the Great War of 1914-18.”

“Antique, is it?” I looked at it again. “It looks fairly new-make. Is it a copy? Central Asia’s full of old Greek relics, I know. Have they started an antique mint in Kashgar in the hope of a tourist boom after the war? Where did you come by it?”

“Well, it’s a long story, but, if you’re doing nothing to-night, come over to my hotel and dine and I’ll tell you. By itself the coin isn’t much, but I’ve got two other exhibits which fit in. What is it ‘Sapper’ says? ‘Once is nothing, twice is coincidence, three times is a moral certainty.’ I think I’ve got a moral cert.”

And not another word would he say on the matter then, shifting the conversation to France and Palestine, old scraps, old friends, all the miscellany of memories that make up the wandering soldier’s life.

[9]I slipped home and changed, and then to his hotel, where I found him awaiting me in the lounge with a tall, clean-shaven, fair-haired, blue-eyed man who seemed to carry a smack of the sea about him, though somehow I did not set him down as a sailor.

[9]

 Prev. P 10/283 next