The thief, helpless under the grip on the nape of his neck, whined and stammered.  He was a rat of a man, white-faced, pale-eyed, with a sagging, uncertain mouth.

“M’sieur!” he whimpered.  “But I have got nothing!  It is a mistake.  The other man——­”

Cobb thrust him at the end of a long arm to where Savinien stood, the cigarette still unlighted.  The other man, of course, was gone.

“Hullo, Savinien,” said Cobb.  “You know you’ve been robbed, don’t you?  I just caught this fellow as he was bolting.  See what you’ve lost, won’t you?”

“Lost!” Savinien stared, a little stupidly, Cobb thought, and suddenly smiled.  He was bulky to the point of grotesqueness, with a huge white torpid face and a hypochondriac stoop of the shoulders, and the hand that traveled over his waistcoat, from pocket to pocket, looked as if it had been shaped out of dough.

“Well!” said Cobb impatiently, stilling the thief’s whimpering protests with a quick grip of the hand that held him.

“My watch,” murmured Savinien, still smiling though he were pleased and relieved to be the victim of a theft.  “But let him go.”

“Let him go!  Oh no,” said Cobb.  “I’ll hand him over to the police and we’ll get the watch out of him.”

“The watch is nothing,” said Savinien.  “Let him go before there arrives an agent, or it will be too late.”

He came a pace nearer as he spoke, and nodded at Cobb confidentially, as though there were reasons for his request which he could not explain before the on-lookers.

“But——­” began Cobb.

“Let him go,” urged Savinien.  “It is necessary.  Afterwards, I will explain to you.”  He put his shapeless soft hand on Cobb’s arm which held the thief.

“Let him go.”

“You are serious?” demanded Cobb.  “He’s to go, is he?  With your watch?  All right!”

He let go the scraggy neck which he held in the fork of his hand.  They were, by this time, ringed about by spectators, but the thief was not less expert with crowds than with pockets.  He was no sooner loose than he seemed to merge into the folk about, to pass through and beyond them like a vapor.  Heads turned, feet shuffled.  Savinien came about ponderously like a battleship in narrow waters, but the thief was gone.

“Tiens!” ejaculated someone, and there was laughter.

Savinien’s arm insinuated itself through Cobb’s elbow.

“Let us go where we can sit down,” said the poet.  “You are puzzled—­ not?  But I will explain you all that.”

“It wasn’t a bet, was it?” asked Cobb.

The poet laughed gently.  “That possibility alarms you?” he suggested.  “But it was not a bet; it is more vital than that.  I will tell you when we sit down.”

At Savinien’s slow pace they came at last to small marble-topped tables under a striped awning.  Savinien, with loud gasps, let himself down upon an exiguous chair, rested both fat hands upon the head of his stick, and smiled ruefully across the table at Cobb.  A tinge of blue had come out around his lips.