ow
influential people in high places, do not leave any stone unturned, do
all that is humanly possible to save him--to save us!"

Intensely moved by the poor girl's anguish of mind, Fandor could not
trust himself to speak. He bent his head in the affirmative merely.
Hailing a cab, he put her into it, gave the address to the driver, and
as he was closing the door Elizabeth cried:

"Do all that is humanly possible--do everything in the world!"

"I swear to you I will get at the truth," was Fandor's parting promise.
The cab had disappeared, but our journalist stood motionless, absorbed
in his reflections. At last, uttering his thoughts aloud, he said:

"If the Baroness de Vibray has written that she has killed herself, then
she has killed herself, and Dollon is innocent. It's true the letter may
be fictitious ... therefore we must put it aside--we have no guarantee
as to its genuineness.... Here is the problem: Jacques Dollon is dead,
and yet has left the Depot! Yes, but how?"

Jerome Fandor went off in the direction of the offices of _La Capitale_
so absorbed in thought that he jostled the passers-by, without noticing
the angry glances bestowed on him:

"Jacques Dollon, dead, has left the Depot!" He repeated this improbable
statement, so absurd, of necessity incorrect; repeated it to the point
of satiety:

"Jacques Dollon is dead, and he has got away from the Depot!"

Then, in an illuminating flash, he perceived the solution of this
apparently insoluble problem:

"A mystery such as this is incomprehensible, inexplicable, impossible,
except in connection with one man! There is only one individual in the
world capable of making a dead man seem to be alive after his death--and
this individual is--Fantomas!"

To formulate this conclusion was to give himself a thrilling shock....
Since the disappearance of Juve, he had never had occasion to suspect
the presence, the intervention of Fantomas in connection with any of
the crimes he had investigated as reporter and student of human nature.

Fantomas! The sound of that name evoked the worst horrors! Fantomas!
This bandit, this criminal who has not shrunk from any cruelty, any
horror--Fantomas is crime personified!

Fantomas! He sticks at nothing!

Pronouncing these syllables of evil omen, Fandor lived over again all
the extraordinary, improbable, impossible things that had really
happened, and had put him on the watch for this terrifying assassin.

Fantomas!

It