"Damn it, what concern is that of yours?" he replied. "Do you suppose I am likely to have lost eleven thousand dollars? That is to say, lost them—of course I have. But some one else found them before they touched the ground."
"The best thing you can do, Señor Duque, is to let me go over the ground wherever you have been."
"I will go myself after luncheon. Go, if you have nothing else to suggest but calling on all my acquaintances."
Requena went downstairs, dismaying the house like a bombshell, not indeed of powder or dynamite, since uproariousness was not part of his nature, but of sulphuric acid or corrosive sublimate, which trickled into every corner and annoyed and burnt every one in turn. His wife, his lodge-keeper, his cook, Llera, and almost every one of his clerks, had some coarse insult flung in their teeth, in the tone of cynical brutality which he affected. After luncheon he was about to go out on his quest, when a servant came to tell him that a hackney coachman wished to speak with him.
"What does he want?"
"I do not know. He said he wanted to see the Duke."
Salabert, with a sudden flash of intuition, said:
"Show him up."
The man who came in was the driver of the coach which had conveyed him from Calderón's office to his mistress's house. The Duke looked at him anxiously.
"What is it?"