Well, you have, and these others must bear
the brunt with you, should anything serious happen."

"Without my permission you will not remain in Ajaccio a single hour.
But that would not satisfy me. I wish to prove to you your blindness.
I will make you a proposition. Tear up those papers, erase the memory
from your mind, and I will place in your hands every franc of those two
millions."

Breitmann laughed harshly. "You have said that I am mad; very well, I
am. But I know what I know, and I shall go on to the end. You are
clever. I do not know who you are nor why you are here with your
warnings; but this will I say to you: to-morrow we land, and every hour
you are there, death shall lurk at your elbow. Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly. So well, that I shall let you go freely."

"A warning for each, then; only mine has death in it."

"And mine, nothing but good-will and peace."

CHAPTER XXI

CAPTAIN FLANAGAN MEETS A DUKE

The isle of Corsica, for all its fame in romance and history, is yet
singularly isolated and unknown. It is an island whose people have
stood still for a century, indolent, unobserving, thriftless. No
smoke, that ensign of progress, hangs over her towns, which are squalid
and unpicturesque, save they lie back among the mountains. But the
country itself is wildly and magnificently beautiful: great mountains
of granite as varied in colors as the palette of a painter, emerald
streams that plunge over porphyry and marble, splendid forests of pine
and birch and chestnut.

The password was, is, and ever will be, Napoleon. Speak that name and
the native's eye will fire and his patois will rattle forth and tingle
the ear like a snare-drum. Though he pays his tithe to France, he is
Italian; but unlike the Italian of Italy, his predilection is neither
for gardening, nor agriculture, nor horticulture. Nature gave him a
few chestnuts, and he considers that sufficient. For the most part he
subsists upon chestnut-bread, stringy mutton, sinister cheeses, and a
horrid sour wine. As a variety he will shoot small birds and in the
winter a wild pig or two; his toil extends no further, for his wife is
the day-laborer. Viewing him as he is to-day, it does not seem
possible that his ancestors came from Genoa la Superba.

Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, but the blood in his veins was Tuscan,
and his mind Florentine.

These days the world takes little or no interest in the island, save
for i