TRAVELS WITH AN ASSASSIN

Under a sky whose misty silver pulsed with waves of violet light and dim glimmerings of gold, Lanyard, grey with the dust and weariness of twenty leagues of heavy walking, trudged into the sleeping streets of the town of Tournemire.

In the railway station—­whose buvette served him such listless refreshment as one may find at railway lunch-counters and nowhere else the world over—­a train was waiting with an apathetic crew and a sprinkling of sleepy passengers, for the most part farm and village folk of the department.  There was nowhere in evidence any figure resembling that of an agent de police.

Lanyard made enquiry, found that the train was destined for Le Vigan, on the eastern slope of the Cevennes, and purchased a ticket for that point.

Making himself as comfortable as might be in a depressingly third-rate second-class compartment (there was no first class, and the third was far too richly flavoured for his stomach) he cultivated a doze as the train pulled out.  But, driven as provincial trains habitually are, in a high spirit of devil-may-care, its first stop woke him up with a series of savage, back-breaking jolts which were translated into jerks when it started on again and fiendishly reiterated at every suspicion of a way-station on the course.  So that he presently abandoned all hope of sleep and sought solace in tobacco and the shifting views afforded by the windows.  Penetrating the upper valley of the Cernon, the railroad skirted the southern boundary of the Causse Larzac, then laboriously climbed up to the plateau itself; and Lanyard roused to the fact that he was approaching familiar ground from a new angle:  the next stop would be Combe-Redonde.

The day was still in its infancy when that halt was made.  Aside from the station agent, not a soul waited upon the platform.  But one or two passengers were set down and, as the engine began to snort anew, a man darted from behind the tiny structure that housed ticket-office and waiting-room, galloped heavily across the platform, and with nothing to spare threw himself into the compartment immediately behind that wherein Lanyard sat alone.

This manoeuvre was performed so briskly and unexpectedly that Lanyard caught barely a glimpse of the fellow; but one glimpse was enough to convince him he had been wrong in assuming that Monsieur Albert Dupont had sneaked back to Paris to hide from the authorities after failing to assassinate Andre Duchemin more than three weeks ago.

But why—­assuming one were not misled by a chance likeness to that heavy but athletic figure so well-remembered—­why had Dupont lingered so long in the neighbourhood, in hourly peril of arrest?  And why this sudden departure in the chill break of dawn, a move so timed and executed that it wore every sign of haste and fear?