uiries it was proved that Tascheron never played cards.

At first Jean-Francois entrenched himself in a system of flat denials,
which, of course, in presence of a jury, would fall before proof; they
seemed to show the collusion of some person either well versed in law or
gifted with an intelligent mind. The following are the chief proofs the
prosecution were prepared to present, and they are, as is frequently the
case in trials for murder, both important and trifling; to wit:--

The absence of Tascheron during the night of the crime, and his refusal
to say where he was, for the accused did not offer to set up an alibi;
a fragment of his blouse, torn off by the servant-woman in the struggle,
found close by on a tree to which the wind had carried it; his presence
that evening near Pingret's house, which was noticed by passers and
by persons living in the neighborhood, though it might not have been
remembered unless for the crime; a false key made by Tascheron which
fitted the door opening to the fields; this key was found carefully
buried two feet below one of the miser's holes, where Monsieur des
Vanneaulx, digging deep to make sure there was not another layer of
treasure-pots, chanced to find it; the police, after many researches,
found the different persons who had furnished Tascheron with the iron,
loaned him the vice, and given him the file, with which the key was
presumably made.

The key was the first real clue. It put the police on the track of
Tascheron, whom they arrested on the frontiers of the department, in a
wood where he was awaiting the passage of a diligence. An hour later he
would have started for America.

Besides all this, and in spite of the care with which certain footmarks
in the ploughed field and on the mud of the road had been effaced and
covered up, the searchers had found in several places the imprint of
shoes, which they carefully measured and described, and which were
afterwards found to correspond with the soles of Tascheron's shoes
taken from his lodgings. This fatal proof confirmed the statement of
the landlady. The authorities now attributed the crime to some foreign
influence, and not to the man's personal intention; they believed he had
accomplices, basing this idea on the impossibility of one man carrying
away the buried money; for however strong he might be, no man could
carry twenty-five thousand francs in gold to any distance. If each pot
contained, as it was supposed to have don