Suddenly, secretly, a little after midnight, Charlotte left the capital. Maximilian bade her good-bye with a solemn promise to rejoin her in Europe if she failed. Three days later Dupin and his Contra Guerrillas met her in the Tierra Caliente, and offered to join her French cavalry escort. The Empress took his presence as an affront. Of late small things excited her to a feverish agitation which she was unable to control. The Tiger bowed over his saddle, and kept his gray hair bared to a torrential downpour while her carriage passed on. It was the tropical rainy season. The clouds hung low around the mountain base and truncated the more distant peaks, while the valley below was a bright contrast in wet, tender green. The wheels sank deep, and mired in the black, soggy earth. Men tugged constantly at the spokes, and the steaming mules reared and plunged under the angry crack of whips. The Tiger of the Tropics waited as carriage after carriage toiled past him and creaked and was forced on its way. Behind the dripping windowpane of the very last he saw a face he knew, a beautiful, saddened face, puckered just now by some immediate ill-humor. She frowned on recognizing the French barbarian, but unlike Charlotte, she did not jerk down the shutter. Instead, she lowered the glass by the length of her pretty nose. "Is it dotage already, monsieur? Then put on your hat!" "Name of a name, yet another petulant grande dame!" But the Frenchman turned his horse and rode beside her coach. "Did Her Majesty pout, then?" inquired the lady within. "Almost as superbly as Mademoiselle la Marquise." "Thank you well, but I have a superb reason for it." "Because you return to Paris, surely not? Yet, if that is the reason, you need not quite despair." "Why, what--what do you mean?" "Only brigands, mademoiselle. When everyone is looking for abdication, a cortege mysteriously leaving the City must be the Emperor who goes back to Austria. The news travels like wildfire. The Indito runners go as fast as when they brought Moctezuma fresh fish from the Gulf. I rather think they have carried the news to an old friend of ours. It's my chance to catch him." "Not my Fra Diavolo--Rodrigo Galan?" "None other. But Rodrigo is stirred by more than patriotism these days. Upon it he has grafted a deep wrong, and he swears lofty vengeance by a little ivory cross such as these Mexican girls wear. The conceited cut-throat imagines there is a blood feud between himself and His Majesty. So if he hears that Prince Max comes this way----" "He will find Charlotte instead? But he must not detain her." "Tonnerre!" exclaimed the Cossack chief. "Why not? She goes to Europe to sustain the Empire, while we French----" "All the same, let her go. She will gain nothing there. Listen to me, monsieur. She leaves that he may _not_ abdicate, while if I stay, she fears that----" "He _will_ abdicate?"