CHAPTER XIX

CITIZEN SABATIER TURNS TRAITOR

The Rue Charonne in the neighborhood of the Chat Rouge was a busy street.  Its importance as a business quarter had been on the increase for some years, yet in the adjoining back streets extreme poverty existed and there were warrens of iniquity into which the law had feared to penetrate too deeply.  It was an old part of the city, too, built on land once belonging to a monastery whose memory was still kept alive by the names of mean streets and alleys into which byways respectable citizens did not go.  There were stories current of men who had ventured and had never come forth again.  With some of the inhabitants, it was asserted, the attainment of an almost worthless trinket, or a single coin, or even a garment, was considered cheap as the price of murder; and so intricate were the streets, so honeycombed with secret hiding-places known only to the initiated, that attempts to enforce justice had almost invariably ended in failure.  Naturally this squalid neighborhood materially swelled the yelling crowds who, in the name of patriotism, openly defied all law and order, and made outrage and murder a national duty as they drank, and danced, and sang the “Ca-ira,” flaunting their rags, sometimes even their nakedness.

Into the midst of such a crowd Richard Barrington had walked as he went to the Chat Rouge; as bloodthirsty a mob as he could possibly have encountered in all Paris, and the Rue Charonne had been turned into Pandemonium when it was realized that the quarry had escaped.  Houses were forcibly entered, men and women insulted and ill-used, the Chat Rouge was invaded and searched, the landlord barely escaping with his life.  The opportunity to drink without cost presently kept the mob busy, however, and as the liquor took effect the work of searching was abandoned for the night, but the next morning the crowd came together again, and for days it was unsafe to go abroad in the Rue Charonne.

Of this quarter was Citizen Jacques Sabatier, never so criminal as many of his fellows, perhaps, yet a dangerous man.  He might pass along these streets in safety, and since he had become a man of some importance, had influence with this mob.  Through him Raymond Latour could count upon the support of those who dwelt in the purlieus of the Rue Charonne, but both he and his henchman knew perfectly well that there were times when any attempt to exert such influence would be useless.  Sabatier, waiting by the Chat Rouge, had heard the sudden cry, “An aristocrat!  The American!” yet he dared not have interfered openly to save Barrington.  Had the fugitive not turned suddenly into the archway where Sabatier waited, it is certain that Sabatier would not have gone out to rescue him.  The chance to help him at little risk had offered itself, and he had taken it.

As Richard Barrington rose to his feet in the straw, he was in pitch darkness, but not alone.  There was a quick movement beside him, and then a voice whispering in his ear: