"Until four o'clock, no later! If it isn't all over at four, I'll let them kill each other alone and come back here. That's the hour that the fine deals commence. To-day's luck is going to continue."
And he fled, smiling with pity on people who were occupied with less important things.
On finding himself alone, the Colonel began to make preparations for the encounter. He needed a doctor. He would go next morning and find an old physician in Monte Carlo who visited the Prince from time to time. He needed powder and balls; he proposed to go in quest of them to-morrow also. He needed two cases of pistols, and he had only one!
The matter of the two cases he considered essential. The other man's seconds did not know where to get theirs. No matter; he would find them one. The indispensable thing was that there should be two, so that fate might decide which they should use. Without that, the conditions would not be equal. And he spent the time until about one o'clock in the morning, asking hotel employees, rousing people out of bed, going down to the rooms of the Sporting Club, until an American whom he knew gave him a note for a certain fellow-countryman, a gloomy, half crazy fellow, who lived in an isolated villa on Cap-Ferrat. He thought he would conclude this negotiation the following day; and to do so he had rented an automobile.
Owing to the lack of vehicles and gas, the cost of the car was enormous; but it was necessary owing to the importance of his functions.
But now he was in Villa Sirena, at two o'clock in the morning, slowly cleaning the pistols, as though they were fragile jewels.
In the silence of his bedroom, far from mankind, influenced by the lonely mystery of the small hours of the night, which puts a certain vagueness in things and ideas, he felt an enormous self-aggrandizement. No; his world had not changed as much as he thought. The proof was that he was there, cleaning weapons for a duel!
On waking up the next morning, the Prince could not find his "chamberlain". The rented auto had carried him off at seven o'clock, to complete his preparations.
Lubimoff wandered about the gardens, stopping in front of the cages, which sheltered various exotic birds. Then with an absent-minded look, he followed the evolutions of various peacocks, spreading their tails, colored blue and golden, or a royal black, in the sunlight.
His old valet interrupted his promenade. Some men had come with a truck to get Señor Castro's baggage.