f
pay and drafts on France, which he cashes at half the discount charged
by the Company!"

"Give the cursed papers to the clerk and send him off, De Pean!" said
Bigot.

De Pean obeyed with a grimace, and returned.

"This thing must be stopped, and shall!" continued the Intendant,
savagely.

"That is true, your Excellency," said De Pean. "And we have tried
vigorously to stop the evil, but so far in vain. The Governor and the
Honnetes Gens, and too many of the officers themselves, countenance his
opposition to the Company. The Bourgeois draws a good bill upon Paris
and Bordeaux, and they are fast finding it out."

"The Golden Dog is drawing half the money of the Colony into his
coffers, and he will blow up the credit of the Friponne some fine day
when we least expect it, unless he be chained up," replied Bigot.

"'A mechant chien court lien,' says the proverb, and so say I," replied
Cadet. "The Golden Dog has barked at us for a long time; par Dieu! he
bites now!--ere long he will gnaw our bones in reality, as he does in
effigy upon that cursed tablet in the Rue Buade."

"Every dog has his day, and the Golden Dog has nearly had his, Cadet.
But what do you advise?" asked Bigot.

"Hang him up with a short rope and a shorter shrift, Bigot! You have
warrant enough if your Court friends are worth half a handful of chaff."

"But they are not worth half a handful of chaff, Cadet. If I hung the
Bourgeois there would be such a cry raised among the Honnetes Gens in
the Colony, and the whole tribe of Jansenists in France, that I doubt
whether even the power of the Marquise could sustain me."

Cadet looked quietly truculent. He drew Bigot aside. "There are more
ways than one to choke a dog, Bigot," said he. "You may put a tight
collar outside his throat, or a sweetened roll inside of it. Some course
must be found, and that promptly. We shall, before many days, have La
Corne St. Luc and young Philibert like a couple of staghounds in full
cry at our heels about that business at the Chateau. They must be thrown
off that scent, come what will, Bigot!"

The pressure of time and circumstance was drawing a narrower circle
around the Intendant. The advent of peace would, he believed, inaugurate
a personal war against himself. The murder of Caroline was a hard blow,
and the necessity of concealing it irritated him with a sense of fear
foreign to his character.

His suspicion of Angelique tormented him day and night. He had loved