from those fools of gendarmes, no doubt.”
And he tore open the envelope which Colonel Gilbert had handed to the peasant a couple of hours earlier in the Lancone Defile. He fixed his eye-glasses upon his nose, clumsily, with one hand, and then unfolded the letter. It was merely a sheet of blank paper, with a cross drawn upon it.
His face suddenly blazed red with anger. His eyes glared at the paper through the glasses placed crookedly upon his nose.
“Holy name!” he cried. “Look at this—this to me! The dogs!”
The colonel looked at the paper with a shrug of the shoulders.
“You will have to sell,” he suggested lightly; and glancing up at Perucca's face, saw something there that made him leap to his feet. “Hulloa! Here,” he said quickly—“sit down.”
And as he forced Perucca into the chair, his hands were already at the old man's collar. And in five minutes, in the presence of Colonel Gilbert and two old servants, Mattei Perucca died.
CHAPTER IV. A TOSS-UP.
“One can be but what one is born.”
If any one had asked the Count Lory de Vasselot who and what he was, he would probably have answered that he was a member of the English Jockey Club. For he held that that distinction conferred greater honour upon him than the accident of his birth, which enabled him to claim for grandfather the first Count de Vasselot, one of Murat's aides-de-camp, a brilliant, dashing cavalry officer, a boyhood's friend of the great Napoleon. Lory de Vasselot was, moreover, a cavalry officer himself, but had not taken part in any of the enterprises of an emperor who held that to govern Frenchmen it is necessary to provide them with a war every four years.
“Bon Dieu!” he told his friends, “I did not sleep for two nights after I was elected to that great club.”
Lory de Vasselot, moreover, did his best to live up to his position. He never, for instance, had his clothes made in Paris. His very gloves came from a little shop in
Prev.
Back
Top