Left alone, the head of the Secret Service wiped his brow and drank a great glass of iced water which he emptied at a draught.  Then he said: 

“Koupriane will have his work cut out for him this evening; I wish him good luck.  As to them, whatever happens, I wash my hands of them.”

And he rubbed his hands.

X

A DRAMA IN THE NIGHT

At the door of the Krestowsky Rouletabille, who was in a hurry for a conveyance, jumped into an open carriage where la belle Onoto was already seated.  The dancer caught him on her knees.

“To Eliaguine, fast as you can,” cried the reporter for all explanation.

“Scan!  Scan! (Quickly, quickly)” repeated Onoto.

She was accompanied by a vague sort of person to whom neither of them paid the least attention.

“What a supper!  You waked up at last, did you?” quizzed the actress.  But Rouletabille, standing up behind the enormous coachman, urged the horses and directed the route of the carriage.  They bolted along through the night at a dizzy pace.  At the corner of a bridge he ordered the horses stopped, thanked his companions and disappeared.

“What a country!  What a country!  Caramba!” said the Spanish artist.

The carriage waited a few minutes, then turned back toward the city.

Rouletabille got down the embankment and slowly, taking infinite precautions not to reveal his presence by making the least noise, made his way to where the river is widest.  Seen through the blackness of the night the blacker mass of the Trebassof villa loomed like an enormous blot, he stopped.  Then he glided like a snake through the reeds, the grass, the ferns.  He was at the back of the villa, near the river, not far from the little path where he had discovered the passage of the assassin, thanks to the broken cobwebs.  At that moment the moon rose and the birch-trees, which just before had been like great black staffs, now became white tapers which seemed to brighten that sinister solitude.

The reporter wished to profit at once by the sudden luminance to learn if his movements had been noticed and if the approaches to the villa on that side were guarded.  He picked up a small pebble and threw it some distance from him along the path.  At the unexpected noise three or four shadowy heads were outlined suddenly in the white light of the moon, but disappeared at once, lost again in the dark tufts of grass.

He had gained his information.

The reporter’s acute ear caught a gliding in his direction, a slight swish of twigs; then all at once a shadow grew by his side and he felt the cold of a revolver barrel on his temple.  He said “Koupriane,” and at once a hand seized his and pressed it.

The night had become black again.  He murmured:  “How is it you are here in person?”

The Prefect of Police whispered in his ear: