t, he demanded, did this foreigner affront his ears with
demands for money; how dared he force his way into his presence and to
his face babble of back pay? It was insolent, incredible. With
indignation the president set forth the position of the government.
Billy had been discharged and, with the appointment of his successor,
the stranger in the derby hat, had ceased to exist. The government could
not pay money to some one who did not exist. All indebtedness to Billy
also had ceased to exist. The account had been wiped out. Billy had been
wiped out.

The big negro, with the chest and head of a gorilla, tossed his kinky
white curls so violently that the ringlets danced. Billy, he declared,
had been a pest; a fly that buzzed and buzzed and disturbed his
slumbers. And now when the fly thought he slept he had caught and
crushed it--so. President Ham clinched his great fist convulsively and,
with delight in his pantomime, opened his fingers one by one, and held
out his pink palm, wrinkled and crossed like the hand of a washerwoman,
as though to show Billy that in it lay the fly, dead.

"_C'est une chose jugee_!" thundered the president.

He reached for his quill pen.

But Billy, with Claire in his heart, with the injustice of it rankling
in his mind, did not agree.

"It is not an affair closed," shouted Billy in his best French. "It is
an affair international, diplomatic; a cause for war!"

Believing he had gone mad, President Ham gazed at him speechless.

"From here I go to the cable office," shouted Billy. "I cable for a
warship! If, by to-night, I am not paid my money, marines will surround
our power-house, and the Wilmot people will back me up, and my
government will back me up!"

It was, so Billy thought, even as he launched it, a tirade satisfying
and magnificent. But in his turn the president did not agree.

He rose. He was a large man. Billy wondered he had not previously
noticed how very large he was.

"To-night at nine o'clock," he said, "the German boat departs for New
York." As though aiming a pistol, he raised his arm and at Billy pointed
a finger. "If, after she departs, you are found in Port-au-Prince, you
will be shot!"

The audience-chamber was hung with great mirrors in frames of tarnished
gilt. In these Billy saw himself reproduced in a wavering line of
Billies that, like the ghost of Banquo, stretched to the disappearing
point. Of such images there was an army, but of the real Billy, as he