“It is very salt, Herr Doctor.”
“And the compass?”
“It is ten degrees wrong.”
“The boys have their orders?”
“They understand perfectly, Herr Doctor. If the Englishman does not drink, they will take him at midnight to where His Excellency will be encamped at the bend of the Blue River.”
The doctor sighed. He was not at heart an unkindly man.
“I think,” he murmured, “it will be better for the Englishman that he drinks.”
CHAPTER III
Mr. John Lambert Mangan of Lincoln's Inn gazed at the card which a junior clerk had just presented in blank astonishment, an astonishment which became speedily blended with dismay.