it.

"Curse the boar!" said he. "I want to know how he gets the dogs' coats
so fine."

As the king spoke a servant entered, carrying a telegram for Sapt. The
colonel took it and put it in his pocket.

"Read it," said the king. He had dined and was about to go to bed, it
being nearly ten o'clock.

"It will keep, sire," answered Sapt, who did not know but that it might
be from Wintenberg.

"Read it," insisted the king testily. "It may be from Rischenheim.
Perhaps he can get here sooner. I should like to know about those dogs.
Read it, I beg."

Sapt could do nothing but read it. He had taken to spectacles lately,
and he spent a long while adjusting them and thinking what he should
do if the message were not fit for the king's ear. "Be quick, man, be
quick!" urged the irritable king.

Sapt had got the envelope open at last, and relief, mingled with
perplexity, showed in his face.

"Your Majesty guessed wonderfully well. Rischenheim can be here at eight
to-morrow morning," he said, looking up.

"Capital!" cried the king. "He shall breakfast with me at nine, and I'll
have a ride after the boar when we've done our business. Now are you
satisfied?"

"Perfectly, sire," said Sapt, biting his moustache.

The king rose with a yawn, and bade the colonel good-night. "He must
have some trick I don't know with those dogs," he remarked, as he went
out. And "Damn the dogs!" cried Colonel Sapt the moment that the door
was shut behind his Majesty.

But the colonel was not a man to accept defeat easily. The audience that
he had been instructed to postpone was advanced; the king, whom he
had been told to get away from Zenda, would not go till he had seen
Rischenheim. Still there are many ways of preventing a meeting. Some
are by fraud; these it is no injustice to Sapt to say that he had tried;
some are by force, and the colonel was being driven to the conclusion
that one of these must be his resort.

"Though the king," he mused, with a grin, "will be furious if anything
happens to Rischenheim before he's told him about the dogs."

Yet he fell to racking his brains to find a means by which the count
might be rendered incapable of performing the service so desired by the
king and of carrying out his own purpose in seeking an audience. Nothing
save assassination suggested itself to the constable; a quarrel and a
duel offered no security; and Sapt was not Black Michael, and had no
band of ruffians to join him in an apparently