"Me?" exclaimed the head waiter, who could not have been more astonished had a bomb exploded under his legs.
"You, Bastien."
"Beg pardon, sir, you said—"
"Discharged!"
"Me—me?"
"You, Bastien."
"What for, sir?" he cried all in a gulp. "Haven't I served you three years without your finding a word of fault?"
"Exactly!" said Fargus, whose black eyes under the frowning eyebrows, like threatening muzzles, had been holding in their pent-up rage. "Exactly. For all that time I have never found fault—found—Bastien. There's the trouble. There's where you started my suspicions. You're clever, my man, but there you overreached yourself."
Before the impossibility of such a charge, Bastien for the first time in his life lost his self-possession and remained, desperately fastening his hope on the chances of a joke. Fargus, shaking with malicious, dumb laughter ran on:
"Too sharp, my man, too clever: You forget I know the business from A to Z. If you'd stolen a little I should have said nothing. Don't tell me you don't steal. You steal—all steal—and if I haven't caught you it's because you stole too well, or, OR," he cried, raising his finger theatrically, to confound him with the shrewdness of his guess, "OR, because you thought you'd wait until you were put where you could touch the keys of the safe! Aha, have I hit it—you scoundrel!"