ands up!... You refuse?... So much the worse for you...
I'm counting... One... Two..."

The policemen did not wait for the word of command. They fired and, at
once, bending over their oars, gave the boat so powerful an impulse that
it reached the goal in a few strokes.

The commissary watched, revolver in hand, ready for the least movement.
He raised his arm:

"If you stir, I'll blow out your brains!"

But the enemy did not stir for a moment; and, when the boat was bumped
and the two men, letting go their oars, prepared for the formidable
assault, the commissary understood the reason of this passive attitude:
there was no one in the boat. The enemy had escaped by swimming, leaving
in the hands of the victor a certain number of the stolen articles,
which, heaped up and surmounted by a jacket and a bowler hat, might be
taken, at a pinch, in the semi-darkness, vaguely to represent the figure
of a man.

They struck matches and examined the enemy's cast clothes. There were no
initials in the hat. The jacket contained neither papers nor pocketbook.
Nevertheless, they made a discovery which was destined to give the case
no little celebrity and which had a terrible influence on the fate of
Gilbert and Vaucheray: in one of the pockets was a visiting-card which
the fugitive had left behind... the card of Arsene Lupin.

At almost the same moment, while the police, towing the captured skiff
behind them, continued their empty search and while the soldiers
stood drawn up on the bank, straining their eyes to try and follow the
fortunes of the naval combat, the aforesaid Arsene Lupin was quietly
landing at the very spot which he had left two hours earlier.

He was there met by his two other accomplices, the Growler and the
Masher, flung them a few sentences by way of explanation, jumped
into the motor-car, among Daubrecq the deputy's armchairs and other
valuables, wrapped himself in his furs and drove, by deserted roads,
to his repository at Neuilly, where he left the chauffeur. A
taxicab brought him back to Paris and put him down by the church of
Saint-Philippe-du-Roule, not far from which, in the Rue Matignon, he
had a flat, on the entresol-floor, of which none of his gang, excepting
Gilbert, knew, a flat with a private entrance. He was glad to take
off his clothes and rub himself down; for, in spite of his strong
constitution, he felt chilled to the bone. On retiring to bed, he
emptied the contents of his pockets, as usual,