What followed was not very clear to him, a melange of impressions.  The mock-American fought like a devil unchained, cursing Duchemin fluently in the purest and foulest argot of Belleville—­which is not in the French vocabulary of the doughboy.  The animals at the pole caught fire of this madness and ran away in good earnest, that wretched barouche rolled and pitched like a rudderless shell in a crazy sea, the two men floundered in its well like fish in a pail.

They fought by no rules, with no science, but bit and kicked and gouged and wrenched and struck as occasion offered and each to the best of his ability.  Duchemin caught glimpses of a face like a Chinese devil-mask, hideously distorted with working features and disfigured with smears of soot through which insane eyeballs rolled and glared in the moonlight.  Then a hand like a vice gripped his windpipe, he was on his back, his head overhanging the edge of the floor, a thumb was feeling for one of his eyes.  Yet it could not have been much later when he and his opponent were standing and swaying as one, locked in an embrace of wrestlers.

Still, Duchemin knew as many tricks of hand-to-hand fighting as the other, perhaps a few more.  And then he was, no doubt, in far better condition.  At all events the fellow was presently at his mercy, in a hold that gave one the privilege of breaking his back at will.  A man of mistaken scruples, Duchemin failed to do so, but held the other helpless only long enough to find his hip-pocket and rip out the pistol—­a deadly Luger.  Then a thrust and a kick, which he enjoyed infinitely, sent the brute spinning out to land on his head.

The fall should have broken his neck.  At the worst it should have stunned him.  Evidently it didn’t.  When Duchemin had scrambled up to the box, captured the reins and brought the nags to a stop—­no great feat that; they were quite sated with the voluptuousness of running away and well content to heed the hand and voice of authority—­and when, finally, he swung them round and drove back toward the cirque, he saw no sign of his Apache by the roadside.

So he congratulated himself on the forethought which had possessed him of the pistol.  Otherwise the assassin, since he had retained sufficient wit and strength to crawl into hiding, could and assuredly would have potted Monsieur Duchemin with neither difficulty nor compunction.

Not five figures but four only were waiting beside the cirque when, wheeling the barouche as near the group as the lay of the ground permitted, he climbed down.  A man lay at length in the coarse grass, his head pillowed in the lap of one woman.  Another woman stood aside, trembling and wringing aged hands.  The third knelt beside the supine man, but rose quickly as Duchemin drew near, and came to meet him.

In this one he recognised her to whose salvation Chance had first led him, and now found time to appreciate a face of pallid loveliness, intelligent and composed, while she addressed him quietly and directly to the point in a voice whose timbre was, he fancied, out of character with the excellent accent of its French.  An exquisite voice, nevertheless.  English, he guessed, or possibly American, but much at home in France....