"Just what I was going to propose the moment I finished his letter!" declared M. Perissard.
So the letter was written and a postal order for a thousand francs enclosed. Laroque was requested to meet M. Perissard at the Hotel of the Three Crowns in Bordeaux as soon as he could get there.
Some three weeks later M. Frederic Laroque, accompanied by the lady of the Café Libertad, walked up the gangplank of the "Amazon," bound for France, while on the pier, Manuel Silvas blasphemed the Virgin because he was armed only with a knife; and Laroque had carelessly dropped his hand on his pistol pocket as he passed.
[CHAPTER IX]
THE HOTEL OF THE THREE CROWNS
Marie, the pretty chambermaid of the Hotel of the Three Crowns, was visibly nervous one misty day in April. She could not be kept away from the front door, which opened on a dingy street a few minutes' walk from the railway station.
Not that there was any particular reason why she should not be there. The guests of the Hotel of the Three Crowns were late risers as a rule. It was too early to set about her duties, and in the meantime the proprietor would rather have had her at the front door than anywhere else, for we have mentioned the fact that she was pretty, and that made her the only attractive feature about the front of the down-at-heel little inn. Transients of the commercial traveler type were seldom known to walk past the door if they caught a glimpse of Marie.
It was for one of these gentlemen that Marie was so anxiously waiting, and her nervousness was due to the fact that her husband, Victor, the "boots" of the hotel, was roaming around in the background. He was as simple-minded and unattractive as a husband ought to be. Whenever his intellect tried to grasp anything beyond the mysteries of cleaning shoes and carrying trunks it ran into heavy opaque obstructions.