Chauvelin’s voice had now assumed a threatening tone, and Gourdon felt all his audacity and self-assurance fall away from him, leaving him a prey to nameless terror.

“We must round up Rateau,” he murmured hastily.  “He cannot have gone far.”

“No, he cannot,” rejoined Chauvelin dryly.  “Though I was not specially thinking of Rateau or of diamonds when I started to come hither.  I did send a general order forbidding any person on foot or horseback to enter or leave Paris by any of the southern gates.  That order will serve us well now.  Are you riding?”

“Yes.  I left my horse at the tavern just outside Gentilly.  I can get to horse within ten minutes.”

“To horse, then, as quickly as you can.  Pay off your men and dismiss them—­all but Tournefort, who had best accompany us.  Do not lose a single moment.  I’ll be ahead of you and may come up with Rateau before you overtake me.  And if I were you, citizen Gourdon,” he concluded, with ominous emphasis, “I would burn one or two candles to your compeer the devil.  You’ll have need of his help if Rateau gives us the slip.”

III

The first part of the road from Gentilly to Paris runs through the valley of the Biere, and is densely wooded on either side.  It winds in and out for the most part, ribbon-like, through thick coppice of chestnut and birch.  Thus it was impossible for Chauvelin to spy his quarry from afar; nor did he expect to do so this side of the Hopital de la Sante.  Once past that point, he would find the road quite open and running almost straight, in the midst of arid and only partially cultivated land.

He rode at a sharp trot, with his caped coat wrapped tightly round his shoulders, for it was raining fast.  At intervals, when he met an occasional wayfarer, he would ask questions about a tall man who had a consumptive cough, and who was carrying a cumbersome burden under his arm.

Almost everyone whom he thus asked remembered seeing a personage who vaguely answered to the description:  tall and with a decided stoop—­yes, and carrying a cumbersome-looking bundle under his arm.  Chauvelin was undoubtedly on the track of the thief.

Just beyond Meuves he was overtaken by Gourdon and Tournefort.  Here, too, the man Rateau’s track became more and more certain.  At one place he had stopped and had a glass of wine and a rest, at another he had asked how close he was to the gates of Paris.

The road was now quite open and level; the irregular buildings of the hospital appeared vague in the rain-sodden distance.  Twenty minutes later Tournefort, who was riding ahead of his companions, spied a tall, stooping figure at the spot where the Chemin de Gentilly forks, and where stands a group of isolated houses and bits of garden, which belong to la Sante.  Here, before the days when the glorious Revolution swept aside all such outward signs of superstition, there had stood a Calvary.  It was now used as a signpost.  The man stood before it, scanning the half-obliterated indications.