er! After the lackeys, the master! Sooner or
later Lagardere will come to you!"

IX

THE SCYTHE OF TIME

The years came and the years went, as had been their way since the fall
of Troy and earlier. To the philosophic eye, surveying existence with the
supreme wisdom of the initiate into mysteries, things changed but little
through eons on the surface of the world, where men loved and hated, bred
and slew, triumphed and failed, lorded and cringed as had been the way
since the beginning, when the cave man that handled the heavier
knuckle-bone ruled the roost. But to the unphilosophic eye of the
majority of mankind things seemed to change greatly in a very little
while; and it seemed, therefore, to the superficial, that many things had
happened in France and in Paris during the seventeen years that had
elapsed since the fight in the moat of Caylus.

To begin with, the great cardinal, the Red Man, the master of France, had
dipped from his dusk to his setting, and was inurned, with much pomp and
solemnity, as a great prince of the church should be, and the planet
wheeled on its indifferent way, though Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de
Richelieu, was no more. His Gracious Majesty Louis the Thirteenth,
self-named Louis the Just, found himself, for the first time in his
futile career, his own master, and did not know quite what to make of the
privilege. He mourned the deceased statesman with one eye, as it were,
while he ogled his belated goddess of freedom with the other. It might
well be that she had paid too tardy a visit, but at least he would essay
to trifle with her charms.

Many things had happened to the kingdom over which, for the first time,
his Majesty the King held undivided authority since the night of Caylus
fight. For one thing, by the cardinal's order, all the fortified castles
in France had been dismantled, and many of them reduced to ruins,
owl-haunted, lizard-haunted, ivy-curtained. This decree did not
especially affect Caylus, which had long ceased to be a possible menace
to the state, and, after the death of the grim old marquis, was rapidly
falling into decay on its own account without aid from the ministers of
Richelieu's will. For another thing, two very well-esteemed gentlemen of
his Majesty's Musketeers, having been provoked by two other very
well-esteemed gentlemen of his Eminence's Musketeers, had responded to
the challenge with the habitual alacrity of that distinguished body, and
had vind