“She had a house that could easily be repaired.”
“How cunning you are!”
Bibi laughed.
“But she would not do business with me, you see. Not that I cared two sous about her; I don’t get excited over black-haired women. I shouldn’t have meddled with her and her man if they had left me alone; but when a fellow plays you a trick like that——!”
“He wants the boot,” said Barbe.
“He will get it, my dear. The fellow has a pistol and is rather free with it, but I shall manage. Meanwhile I have my plans.”
Barbe was interested in Bibi’s plans. She had begun to think that she would like to share in them, and she believed that she was the very woman for Louis Blanc. It appeared that Bibi had postponed the scheme for rebuilding the Hôtel de Paris; his new idea was to buy a couple of big Adrienne huts and erect them in an orchard at the back of the hotel. The red ruin would serve as a sort of placard, a dramatic advertisement for the wooden hotel among the apple trees. “You make your money quickly,” he explained, “and then clear out. In ten years the sentimental people will be tired of the battlefields.”
“But if Manon Latour has the same idea?” Barbe asked.
Bibi finished his drink.
“That’s it,” he said; “that place of hers is being repaired too quickly. But if I frighten that fellow of hers out of Beaucourt, she will be in a bit of a fix. I shall hire a gang to rush my huts up.”