een sent on an errand that evening, had missed Mok
on his return. Ralph was away in Brussels with the professor, so that
his valet, having most of his time on his hands, had thought to take a
holiday during Cheditafa's absence, and had slipped off to the Black
Cat, whose pleasures he had surreptitiously enjoyed before, but never to
such an extent as on this occasion. Cheditafa knew he had been there,
and when he started out to look for him, it was to the Black Cat that he
went first.

Before he had quite reached the door, Cheditafa had been shocked and
angered to hear his favorite hymn sung in a beer-shop by that reprobate
and incompetent Mok, and he had rushed in, and in a minute seized the
blatant vocalist by the collar, and ordered him instantly to shut his
mouth and pay his reckoning. Then, in spite of the shouts of
disapprobation which arose on every side, he led away the negro as if he
had been a captured dog with his tail between his legs.

Mok could easily have thrown Cheditafa across the street, but his respect
and reverence for his elder and superior were so great that he obeyed his
commands without a word of remonstrance.

Now up sprang Banker, who was in such a hurry to go that he forgot to pay
for his beer, and when he performed this duty, after having been abruptly
reminded of it by a waiter, he was almost too late to follow the two
black men, but not quite too late. He was an adept in the tracking of
his fellow-beings, and it was not long before he was quietly following
Mok and Cheditafa, keeping at some distance behind them, but never
allowing them to get out of his sight.

In the course of a moderate walk he saw them enter the Hotel Grenade.
This satisfied the wandering Rackbird. If the negroes went into that
hotel at that time of night, they must live there, and he could suspend
operations until morning.

CHAPTER XLIV

MR. BANKER'S SPECULATION

That night Banker was greatly disturbed by surmises and conjectures
concerning the presence of the two negroes in the French capital. He knew
Cheditafa quite as well as he knew Mok, and it was impossible that he
should be mistaken. It is seldom that any one sees a native African in
Paris, and he was positive that the men he had seen, dressed in expensive
garments, enjoying themselves like gentlemen of leisure, and living at a
grand hotel, were the same negroes he had last seen in rags and shreds,
lodged in a cave in the side of a precipice, toili