“Perhaps, but the adventure amuses me.  It will be an advertisement.”

“Very well.  But your silence is necessary until to-morrow.  I’ll buy it.  Here’s twenty thousand francs.”

Ten minutes later Don Luis was dressed in an airman’s suit, cap, and goggles; and an aeroplane rose to a height of two thousand five hundred feet to avoid the air currents, flew above the Seine, and darted due west across France.

Versailles, Maintenon, Chartres....

Don Luis had never been up in an aeroplane.  France had achieved the conquest of the air while he was fighting with the Legion and in the plains of the Sahara.  Nevertheless, sensitive though he was to new impressions—­and what more exciting impression could he have than this?—­he did not experience the heavenly delight of the man who for the first time soars above the earth.  What monopolized his thoughts, strained his nerves, and excited his whole being to an exquisite degree was the as yet impossible but inevitable sight of the motor which they were pursuing.

Amid the tremendous swarm of things beneath them, amid the unexpected din of the wings and the engine, in the immensity of the sky, in the infinity of the horizon, his eyes sought nothing but that, and his ears admitted no other sound than the hum of the invisible car.  His were the mighty and brutal sensations of the hunter chasing his game.  He was the bird of prey whom the distraught quarry has no chance of escaping.

Nogent-le-Rotrou, La Ferte-Bernard, Le Mans....

The two companions did not exchange a single word.  Before him Perenna saw Davanne’s broad back and powerful neck and shoulders.  But, by bending his head a little, he saw the boundless space beneath him; and nothing interested him but the white ribbon of road that ran from town to town and from village to village, at times quite straight, as though a hand had stretched it, and at others lazily winding, broken by a river or a church.

On this ribbon, at some place always closer and closer, were Florence and her abductor!

He never doubted it!  The yellow taxi was continuing its patient and plucky little effort.  Mile after mile, through plains and villages, fields and forests, it was making Angers, with Les Ponts-de-Drive after, and, right at the end of the ribbon, the unattainable goal:  Nantes, Saint-Nazaire, the steamer ready to start, and victory for the scoundrel....

He laughed at the idea.  As if there could be a question of any victory but his, the victory of the falcon over its prey, the victory of the flying bird over the game that runs afoot!  Not for a second did he entertain the thought that the enemy might have slunk away by taking another road.

There are some certainties that are equivalent to facts.  And this one was so great that it seemed to him that his adversaries were obliged to comply with it.  The car was travelling along the road to Nantes.  It would cover an average of twenty miles an hour.  And as he himself was travelling at the rate of sixty miles, the encounter would take place at the spot named, Les Ponts-de-Drive, and at the hour named, twelve o’clock.