"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 unprovoked kidnapping of a distinguished
nobleman.
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