Page:Anthony Hope - Rupert of Hentzau.djvu/69

Rh the Colonel good-night. "He must have some trick I don't know with those dogs," he remarked, as he went out; and

"Damn the dogs!" cried Colonel Sapt the moment that the door was shut behind His Majesty.

But the Colonel was not a man to accept defeat easily. The audience that he had been instructed to postpone was advanced; the King, whom he had been told to get away from Zenda, would not go till he had seen Rischenheim. Still there are many ways of preventing a meeting. Some are by fraud, these it is no injustice to Sapt to say that he had tried; some are by force, and the Colonel was being driven to the conclusion that one of these must be his resort. "Though the King," he mused with a grin, "will be furious if anything happens to Rischenheim before he's told him about the dogs."

Yet he fell to racking his brains to find a means by which the Count might be rendered incapable of performing the service so desired by the King and of carrying out his own purpose in seeking an audience. Nothing save assassination suggested itself to the Constable; a quarrel and a duel offered no security; and Sapt was not Black Michael, and had no band of ruffians to join him in an apparently unprovoked kidnapping of a distinguished nobleman.