"Are these counterfeit, too?"
"Mon Dieu, no!" the old fellow gasped, and I, also, caught my breath; for in the bundle were hundreds of unregistered French bonds, of the highest denomination.
Opening one, I looked at the last coupon, announcing that it bore a date of about seventeen years ago, whereupon Monsieur cried:
"Ah, I see it! This accounts for the royal seal we found! Here, at last, is the perpetrator of that grand swindle, lying peacefully behind the door and not caring what we discover! But he has taken his rue with the spoils!—he dared not enjoy these because of the lees he saw in the pleasure cup!"
"Chop that off," Tommy told him. "If you've an inspiration about this stuff, come across with it!"
"Ah-ha, that man—that capitaine Jess! His name is Karl Schartzmann, a shrewd, rascally German who vanished after the coup d'état!"
"What swindle, Monsieur?—what coup d'état? Whom do these belong to?" I was really losing patience; and Tommy murmured:
"Jack, didn't it strike you that only a German mind could have conceived that revenge on Efaw Kotee?"
"It was certainly true to German form," I admitted, without reluctance.
"The Bank of France!—who else?" Monsieur was saying. "As one of the trusted, I know! Listen: the dead man behind us, and the one called Jess, with our Azurian consul in Paris—all scoundrels—hatched a swindle to sell, through forged state authority and a farcical secret diplomacy, a portion of Azuria to France. This, you may remember, came near upsetting the Balkans in 1903. Their crafty scheme lay ready to be sprung when Efaw Kotee—we will call him that—had to kidnap the princess in self-defense. From that time but fragmentary facts came dribbling in from secret agents, as follows: