Hardly had I issued my orders when one of my palace guards approached with every evidence of excitement. After bowing to the floor in the established manner, he addressed me hastily.
"Your Abysmal Excellency, there is a vagabond outside who asks to see you. I told him it was impossible, that you were tied up in a conference; but he insisted until I had a mind to throw him into the dungeon to cool his impatience. Finally he gave me a bit of paper, and said that if I passed it to you, you would understand. He must be a madman, Your Excellency, for the paper is filled with a meaningless scrawl."
"Let me see it!" I demanded as I fairly snatched at the rumpled notepaper which the guard held out.
I am sure that the man, thoughtless though he was trained to be, was surprised to note the gasp of astonished joy with which I glanced at the paper, and the agitated haste with which I demanded, "Quick! Show the visitor in!"
As the guard saluted and left, I began to pace rapidly back and forth, while reading over and over again those few words in a handwriting I knew so well!
A minute later, a queer-looking figure entered the room. I do not wonder that the guard had called him a vagabond; his robe was ripped and torn in a hundred places, and here and there it was stained with splashes of blood; a dark hood was drawn over his face, concealing the hair and the features; his eyes looked out at me from behind binoculars, such as were worn by near-sighted citizens; his long, cone-shaped hat was battered and dented as if from a scuffle, and the black glove was missing from his right hand.
My visitor waited until the guard had left; then he removed his binoculars and threw off his hood to reveal a figure familiar and yet strange. For a moment I gaped in astonishment at that closely cropped head and that face from which every vestige of a beard had been shaved—at those eyes, deeply sunken as if from a sleepless vigil—at the long, drawn features, with the worn and ravaged lines. "Phil!" I exclaimed. "I hardly recognized you!"
"No wonder!" he returned, wearily, as he sank down upon a chair, "I've been through hell itself!"
"But you're here at last! That's the main thing!" I rejoiced. "Heavens, you don't know how worried I was!"
"You don't know how worried I was, old pal!" he replied as he wiped his perspiring brow and shook his shorn head dolefully. "I ought to have taken your advice, Frank. This Dictator business doesn't agree with me!"