"Your clerk seems to me a bad lot, quite capable of getting you
into hot water; but he is as clever as any rogue. He says the line
for you to take is to call out louder than any one, and to send
out an inspector, a special commissioner, to discover who is
really guilty, rake up abuses, and make a fuss, in short; but if
we stir up the struggle, who will stand between us and the law?
"If your commissioner arrives here by the 1st of September, and
you have given him your orders, sending by him two hundred
thousand francs to place in our storehouses the supplies we
profess to have secured in remote country places, we shall be
absolutely solvent and regarded as blameless. You can trust the
soldier who is the bearer of this letter with a draft in my name
on a house in Algiers. He is a trustworthy fellow, a relation of
mine, incapable of trying to find out what he is the bearer of. I
have taken measures to guarantee the fellow's safe return. If you
can do nothing, I am ready and willing to die for the man to whom
we owe our Adeline's happiness!"
The anguish and raptures of passion and the catastrophe which had
checked his career of profligacy had prevented Baron Hulot's ever
thinking of poor Johann Fischer, though his first letter had given
warning of the danger now become so pressing.
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