stop to figure.

Before retiring he went through certain exercises with an unusual
vehemence. He was taking a course in jiu-jitsu from a correspondence
school. Aforetime he had dreamed of a street encounter, with some
blustering bully twice his size, from which, thanks to his skill, he
would emerge unscarred, unruffled, perhaps flecking a bit of dust from
one slight but muscular shoulder while his antagonist lay screaming with
pain.

With the approach of sleep all his half-doubts were swept away. Of course
he had been Napoleon. He could almost remember Marengo--or was it
Austerlitz? There was a vague but not distressing uncertainty as to
which of these conflicts he had directed, but he could--almost--remember.

And he had been one who commanded, and who, therefore, would make
nothing of pricing a dog. He would enter that store boldly to-morrow,
give its proprietor glare for glare, and demand to be told the price of
the creature in the window. Napoleon would have made nothing of it.

* * * * *

The old man came noisily from his back room and again glowered above his
spectacles. But this time he faced no weakling who made a subterfuge of
undesired goldfish.

Bean gulped once, it is true, before words would come.

"I--uh--what's the price of that dog in the window?"

The old man removed his spectacles, ran a hand through upstanding white
hair, and regarded his questioner suspiciously.

"You vant him, hey? Vell, I tell. Fifdy dollars, you bed your life!"

The blood leaped in his veins. He had expected to hear a hundred at
least. Still, fifty was a difficult enough sum. He hesitated.

"Er--what's his name?"

"Naboleon."

"_What?_" He could not believe this thing.

"Naboleon. It comes in his bedigree when I giddim. You bed your life I
gif him nod such names--robber, killer, Frenchman!"

Bean felt assaulted.

"He was a fighter?"

"Yah, fider--a killer unt a sdealer. You know what?"--his face lightened
a little with garrulity--"my granmutter she seen him, yah, sure she seen
him, seddin' on his horse when he gone ridin' into Utrecht in eighdeen
hunderd fife, with soljus. Sure she seen him; she loogs outer a winda'
so she could touch him if she been glose to him, unt a soljus rides oop
unt says, 'Ve gamp right here, not?' unt Naboleon he shneer awful unt
say, 'Gamp here vere dey go inter dem cellus from der ganal-side unt get
unter us unt blow us high wit bowder--you sheep's hea