Two millions in gold and silver and English notes!  He would have his revenge, for all these years of struggle and failure; for the cold and callous policies of state which had driven him to this piece of roguery, on their heads be it.  Two thousand in Marseilles, ready at his beck and call, a thousand more in Avignon, in Lyons, in Dijon, and so on up to Paris, the Paris he had cursed one night from under his mansard.  In a week he would have them shaking in their boots.  The unemployed, the idlers, thieves, his to a man.  If he saw his own death at the end, little he cared.  He would have one great moment, pay off the score, France as well as Germany.  He would at least live to see them harrying each other’s throats.  To declare to France that he was only Germany’s tool, put forward for the sole purpose of destroying peace in the midst of a great military crisis.  He had other papers, and the prying little Frenchman had never seen those; clever forgeries, bearing the signature of certain great German personages.  These should they find at the selected moment.  Let them rip one another’s throats, the dogs!  Two million of francs, enough to purchase a hundred thousand men.

“Ah, my great-grandsire, if spirits have eyes, yours will see something presently.  And that poor little devil of a secret agent thinks I want a crown on my head!  There was a time . . .  Curse these infernal headaches!”

On, on; hurry, hurry.  The driver was faithful, a sometime brigand and later a harbor boatman; and of all his confederates this one was the only man he dared trust on an errand of this kind.

Evisa.  They did not pause.  They ate their supper on the way.  With three Sardinian donkeys, strong and patient little brutes, with lanterns and shovels and sacks, the two fared into the pines.  Aitone was all familiar ground to the Corsican who, in younger days, had taken his illegal tithe from these hills.  They found the range soon enough, but made a dozen mistakes in measurements; and it was long toward midnight, when the oil of the lanterns ran low, that their shovels bore down into the precious pocket.  The earth flew.  They worked like madmen, with nervous energy and power of will; and when the chest finally came into sight, rotten with age and the soak of earth, they fell back against a tree, on the verge of collapse.  The hair was damp on their foreheads, their breath came harshly, almost in sobs.

Suddenly Breitmann fell upon his knees and laughed hysterically, plunged his blistered hands into the shining heap.  It played through his fingers in little musical cascades.  He rose.

“Pietro, you have been faithful to me.  Put your two hands in there.”

“I, padrone?” stupefied.

“Go on!  Go on!  As much as your two hands can hold is yours.  Dig them in deep, man, dig them in deep!”

With a cry Pietro dropped and burrowed into the gold and silver.  A dozen times he started to withdraw his hands, but they trembled so that some of the coins would slip and fall.  At last, with one desperate plunge, the money running down toward his elbows, he turned aside and let fall his burden on the new earth outside the shallow pit.  He rolled beside it, done for, in a fainting state.  Breitmann laughed wildly.