I know it is half of a rug, but it is old and very rare. It is an antique Tabriz. . . ."
Which proved that he'd never seen it before I'd exhumed it from that dark, dusty corner! That he'd not noticed the silver ground! Tabriz .. . . pure and simple improvisation on his part.
"Sixty dollars? Thank you. I am offered sixty. It is worth several hundred. A rare old Tabriz. Seventy? Thank you, madam!"
Damn that school-teacher! What made her think it was worth seventy? Though she might be a decoy to raise the bids. So I came up five.
"Will anyone offer a hundred? Ninety? Give me ninety for this rare old—I am offered ninety! Will someone make it a hundred?"
I rather fancied that my ninety-five would land it.
"Ninety-five . . . once . . . ninety- five . . . twice . . ."
The porter was already thrusting another piece into the auctioneer's weary fingers.
But before the hammer could drop
"El hamdu li-lláh!" gasped someone at my right. "One hundred!"
A lean foreigner with a nose like the beak of a bird of prey took the seat next to me; a Turk, perhaps, or a Kurd whom civilization had not robbed of his alert, predatory air and desert gauntness.
"And ten!" I snapped back.
"One-fifty," enunciated the newcomer.
Hell's hinges! Who was that fool? And who ever heard of an Oriental, unless he were a dealer, caring a happy hoot about the threadbare, worn fragment of an antique ring.
"And seventy-five!"
That ought to stop him. But it didn't. Not for a moment.
"Two hundred," he pronounced.
And when I raised him twenty-five, he did as much for me, and without batting an eyelash. I prayed that some angel would slip me the handle of a meat-ax, and then offered fifty more.
The auctioneer beamed and gloated and rubbed his hands, and praised heaven for connoisseurs who appreciated antiques. The porter, from force of habit, once more began to deploy the precious piece to egg on the bidders, but, catching my eye, he desisted; though it could have done no harm, for that relentless heathen at my right was out for that rug. That "El-hamdu li-lláh!" was the incredulous gasp of one who has stumbled around a corner and met fate face to face; it would be my roll against his.
"Three-fifty!" he announced, scarcely giving the overjoyed auctioneer a chance to acknowledge my last bid.
"Five hundred!" was my last despairing effort.
And "five-fifty" came like the crack of doom.
The stranger rose from his seat, peeled a wad of bills from a roll that would have choked a rhinoceros, and claimed his prize. Have it delivered? Absolutely not! And when I saw the look in his eye, and the gesture with which he draped that scrap over his arm, I knew that all the wealth of the Indies could not separate him from one thread of that ancient relic.
I climbed to my feet and strode down the aisle, talking to myself in non-apostolic tongues. But as I readied the paving, my meditations were interrupted.
"Allow me to thank you, effendi."
It was the foreigner, still caressing the nap of the precious fragment he had draped over his arm.
"I owe you a great deal for having discovered this piece. Though I was almost too late."
I couldn't resist that courtly manner,
