"Filthy old beast he is."
"But he's the strongest man hereabouts."
"I see. And you got onto your old game of the pre-Smith days and tried to get him to put the Okky country and his royal self under the formal protectorate of the British Empire? I thought you dropped all that tommyrot when you got kicked—I mean when you turned trader and became known to fame as Mr. Smith. Sink the past, of course, sink the past, but you started it."
"I couldn't help going. I got news of a French expedition in Okky City. Of course I've been damnably treated by the British Foreign Office in days gone by, but the old fires will relight sometimes. Frenchmen in Okky City, I'll trouble you, Slade, and of course with the usual accompaniment. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. So I couldn't resist trying my own hand with the Kallee, even though I hadn't anything at all up to his weight as an introductory dash."
"Half a dozen cases of Heidsieck is the nearest way to his royal ear, though I hear that lately he's developed a taste for the better years of Krug."
"That's quite true. It was a fancy touch of Burgoyne, our Monk River man. I call that hardly legitimate business, you know. German champagne and angostura are good enough for me, and they ought to be good enough for a black savage like Kallee. Dash it, what right's he to a palate?"
"Would he see you?"
"Well, of course I've known him since before he killed his predecessor and got the King's stool, and so he's a bit freer with me than he is with most people."
Slade nodded. "And you drank together till you were both blind speechless?"
"I wasn't, anyway," said the older man shortly. "I kept my head and stuck to my tale. The Frenchman wasn't in it. He went to sleep before we whacked the first ten bottles, and he was laid up with a fine dose of fever next day; but there was no shifting Kallee. He doesn't care an escribello for all the might, majesty, dominion and power of the British Empire. He's got ten small cannon up there, that, according to him, can quite account for Great Britain if it comes to worry him, and in the meanwhile the French are very kind friends. They've given him a gramophone, and a general's uniform, and an ice-making machine, and when they bring him the canoe load of Winchester repeaters he's asked for, he'll sign a treaty of allegiance to France."