It was not all the truth.  Mercier said nothing of the amount of wine he had drunk, nothing of his boasting.  He described the men at the Lion d’Or as truculent, easily ready to take offense, difficult to persuade.

“They began by rejoicing that a market woman was on her way to Paris to give evidence against an aristocrat,” Mercier said, “and then the devil prompted some man to speculate whether she might not be an aristocrat in disguise.  They were for making certain, and if she were an aristocrat they would have hanged her in the inn yard.  I had to threaten to shoot the first man who attempted to mount the stairs.”

“And even then they only waited to get the better of us,” said Dubois.

“They left the inn sulkily at last,” Mercier went on, “but all night we kept guard upon the stairs, wasting precious hours as it happened.”

“Go on,” said Latour, quietly.

“Soon after dawn we were startled by a groan from the end of a passage, and we went to find a man lying there half dead.  He had been badly handled, near where he lay was a door opening onto stairs which went down to the kitchens and the back entrance to the house.  We went to mademoiselle’s room and found that she had gone.  How it had been accomplished neither Dubois nor I could tell, but we were both convinced that some of the men had stolen back after leaving the inn and had taken mademoiselle away, telling her some plausible tale to keep her silent.  We roused the sleeping inn and searched it from cellar to garret.  From the man lying in the passage we could get no coherent words, though we wasted good brandy on him.  We went to the village, and were not satisfied until we had roused every man who had been at the Lion d’Or that night.  More hours wasted.  Then we went back to the inn and found the man revived somewhat.  He declared that as he came to the top of the stairs a man and a woman met him.  Before he could utter a cry the man seized him by the throat; he was choked and remembered nothing more.  It was natural that our suspicions should turn to this fellow Barrington whom we had so easily outwitted at Beauvais.  On this theory we asked ourselves which way he would be likely to take mademoiselle.  It did not seem possible that they could enter Paris.  We were at a loss what to do, and indeed wasted more time in searching the country in the neighborhood of the Lion d’Or for traces of the fugitives.”

“You have certainly wasted much time,” said Latour.  “Tell me, what is this man Barrington like.”  He had already had a description from Jacques Sabatier, but a word-picture from another source might make the man clearer to him.  Mercier’s description was even better than Sabatier’s.

“Did you tell this story of the Lion d’Or at the barrier?”