D'Artagnan wakes with every word of the hanging still present. He goes in to ask again and finds Athos shrewd and closed. Athos speaks first. His tongue is hot; he must have talked nonsense. D'Artagnan says it was nothing out of the common way, then that he remembers nothing. Athos does not quite believe him. He explains a drinker's habit: sad stories a nurse put into his head, hanging as a nightmare, a fair lady who was hanged. The cover is back. Then he thanks D'Artagnan for the new horse and says he has already lost it. At six, still stupid from the wine, he diced with an Englishman whose mount had died. He lost his own horse, then D'Artagnan's, then mentioned the diamond on his friend's finger.
The stone, valued at a thousand pistoles, was split into ten throws. Athos lost it, staked silent Grimaud in ten portions, won the diamond back, recovered harnesses, and stopped there. He wants D'Artagnan to throw the two harnesses against a horse or a hundred pistoles. D'Artagnan hates the table and still throws. He turns up three. The Englishman, sure of the win, dumps the dice and shows two aces. Athos lists the four times he has seen that throw, including once when he still had a château. D'Artagnan could take the horse. Athos talks him off it. One mount for two men would look like charity. Coins feed a return to Paris and a search for the missing woman. They take the hundred pistoles, pay the host six, leave Bajazet, and ride the lackeys' nags. Planchet and Grimaud walk with saddles on their heads until a market cart picks them up.
At Crèvecœur, Aramis sits at the window like a person watching blessings leave. He has sold the English horse for sixty louis and kept the saddle. He also dined the Jesuit and the curate into asking him to remain a Musketeer. At Chantilly they find Porthos up, less pale, at a table set for four. Athos says they are eating horse. Porthos has 'given' his mount to the governor for eighty louis and kept the harness. He made the best bargain of the three. They count the wreck: Porthos will have thirty crowns, Aramis ten pistoles, D'Artagnan twenty-five after gifts and the inn. Athos has almost nothing. Four hundred and seventy-five livres, more or less, plus saddles. They eat anyway and send the remains to the lackeys.
In Paris a note from Tréville says the king, at the captain's request, has promised D'Artagnan a place among the Musketeers. That was the height of his worldly ambition, apart from finding Mme. Bonacieux. He runs to tell the others and finds them already in council at Athos's rooms. The campaign will open on the first of May. Outfits cannot wait. Their Spartan figure is fifteen hundred livres each. Athos wants two thousand. They have saddles and a few hundred livres. D'Artagnan says a thousand might do, speaking as a procurator, and goes to thank Tréville. When the door shuts, Athos names the ring that beams on their friend's finger. A good comrade, he says, will not leave his brothers in embarrassment while he wears the ransom of a king.
