r. Ah,
you're back, my boy! Is the taxi there? At the corner of the Rue
Raynouard? Capital!"

He looked at his watch again:

"Hullo! No time to lose!"

I stared at him with eager curiosity. But how great must the excitement
of the d'Ernemont heirs have been! True, they had not the same faith in
Captain Jeanniot that I had in Lupin. Nevertheless, their faces were
pale and drawn. Captain Jeanniot turned slowly to the left and walked up
to the sun-dial. The pedestal represented the figure of a man with a
powerful torso, who bore on his shoulders a marble slab the surface of
which had been so much worn by time that we could hardly distinguish the
engraved lines that marked the hours. Above the slab, a Cupid, with
outspread wings, held an arrow that served as a gnomon.

The captain stood leaning forward for a minute, with attentive eyes.

Then he said:

"Somebody lend me a knife, please."

A clock in the neighbourhood struck two. At that exact moment, the
shadow of the arrow was thrown upon the sunlit dial along the line of a
crack in the marble which divided the slab very nearly in half.

The captain took the knife handed to him. And with the point, very
gently, he began to scratch the mixture of earth and moss that filled
the narrow cleft.

Almost immediately, at a couple of inches from the edge, he stopped, as
though his knife had encountered an obstacle, inserted his thumb and
forefinger and withdrew a small object which he rubbed between the palms
of his hands and gave to the lawyer:

"Here, Maitre Valandier. Something to go on with."

It was an enormous diamond, the size of a hazelnut and beautifully cut.

The captain resumed his work. The next moment, a fresh stop. A second
diamond, magnificent and brilliant as the first, appeared in sight.

And then came a third and a fourth.

In a minute's time, following the crack from one edge to the other and
certainly without digging deeper than half an inch, the captain had
taken out eighteen diamonds of the same size.

During this minute, there was not a cry, not a movement around the
sun-dial. The heirs seemed paralyzed with a sort of stupor. Then the fat
gentleman muttered:

"Geminy!"

And the corporal moaned:

"Oh, captain!... Oh, captain!..."

The two sisters fell in a dead faint. The lady with the little dog
dropped on her knees and prayed, while the footman, staggering like a
drunken man, held his head in his two hands, and Louise d'Ernemont wept