"Ha--she brings me good news--zat woman!"
While the Dago Duke was warming up the fried potatoes and bacon, which
remained from breakfast, over the rusty camp-stove, Dubois was diving
under his bunk for a box from which he produced a yellowed shirt and
collar, together with a suit of black clothes, nearly new.
"Per Iddio! 'Tis the Day of Judgment and you've gotten inside
information!" jeered the Dago Duke.
Dubois showed his yellowed teeth.
"Mais oui, 'eet is ze Resurrection."
"I swear, you look like Napoleon, Dubois!" gibed the Dago Duke, when he
was fully arrayed.
"Why not?" The Frenchman's face wore a complacent smirk. "Ze Little
Corporal, _he_ married a queen."
The frying-pan of fried potatoes all but dropped from the Dago Duke's
hand, while his employer enjoyed to the utmost the amazement upon his
face.
"The lady doc?"
Dubois threw up both hands in vehement protest.
"Non, non! Mon Dieu, non, non!"
The Dago Duke shrugged his shoulders impertinently.
"You aim higher, perhaps?"
"Mais certes," he leered. "Old Dubois has thirty thousand sheep."
"To exchange for----"
"A queen, ze belle of Crowheart--Mees Essie Teesdale!"
The Dago Duke stared and continued to regard his employer fixedly. Essie
Tisdale! Had the solitude affected the old man's mind at last? Was he
crazy? How else account for the preposterous suggestion, his colossal
egotism? Why, Essie Tisdale, even to the Dago Duke's critical eye, was
like a delicately tinted prairie rose, while old Dubois with his
iron-gray hair bristling on his bullet-shaped head, his thick,
furrow-encircled neck, his swarthy, obstinate, brutal face, was
seventy, a remarkable seventy, it is true, but seventy, and far from
prepossessing. It was too absurd! It must be one of the lady doc's
practical jokes--it was sufficiently indelicate, he told himself. At any
rate he would soon see Dubois returning crestfallen from his courting
expedition, and the sight, he felt, was one he should relish.
"I'll reserve my congratulations until you come," said the Dago Duke as
he picked up his sheep-herder's staff and returned to his band of sheep.
"You will have ze opportunity, my frien'," grinned Dubois confidently.