e the Wilmot Company could find a place for him a month might pass,
and during that month they might starve. If he went alone and arranged
for Claire to follow, he might lose her. Her mother might marry her to
Paillard; Claire might fall ill; without him at her elbow to keep her to
their purpose the voyage to an unknown land might require more courage
than she possessed. Billy saw it was imperative they should depart
together, and to that end he must have his two thousand dollars. The
money was justly his. For it he had sweated and slaved; had given
his best effort. And so, when he faced the president, he was in no
conciliatory mood. Neither was the president.

By what right, he demanded, did this foreigner affront his ears with
demands for money; how dared he force his way into his presence and
to his face babble of back pay? It was insolent, incredible. With
indignation the president set forth the position of the government:
Billy had been discharged and, with the appointment of his successor,
the stranger in the derby hat, had ceased to exist. The government could
not pay money to some one who did not exist. All indebtedness to Billy
also had ceased to exist. The account had been wiped out. Billy had been
wiped out. The big negro, with the chest and head of a gorilla, tossed
his kinky white curls so violently that the ringlets danced. Billy, he
declared, had been a pest; a fly that buzzed and buzzed and disturbed
his slumbers. And now when the fly thought he slept he had caught and
crushed it-so. President Ham clinched his great fist convulsively and,
with delight in his pantomime, opened his fingers one by one, and held
out his pink palm, wrinkled and crossed like the hand of a washerwoman,
as though to show Billy that in it lay the fly, dead.

"C'EST UNE CHOSE JUGEE!" thundered the president. He reached for his
quill pen.

But Billy, with Claire in his heart, with the injustice of it rankling
in his mind, did not agree.

"It is not an affair closed," shouted Billy in his best French. "It is
an affair international, diplomatic; a cause for war!"

Believing he had gone mad, President Ham gazed at him speechless.

"From here I go to the cable Office," shouted Billy. "I cable for a
warship! If, by to-night, I am not paid my money, marines will
surround our power-house, and the Wilmot people will back me up, and my
government will back me up!"

It was, so Billy thought, even as he launched it, a tirade satisfying