the safe. I remember seeing the parcel."

"Well?"

"They are there still."

"Impossible!"

"They are, upon my word! I might tell you that I was afraid of the
detectives, or else plead a sudden attack of delicacy. But the truth is
simpler ... and more prosaic: the smell was too awful!..."

"What?"

"Yes, my dear fellow, the smell that came from that safe ... from that
coffin.... No, I couldn't do it ... my head swam.... Another second and
I should have been ill.... Isn't it silly?... Look, this is all I got
from my expedition: the tie-pin.... The bed-rock value of the pearl is
thirty thousand francs.... But all the same, I feel jolly well annoyed.
What a sell!"

"One more question," I said. "The word that opened the safe!"

"Well?"

"How did you guess it?"

"Oh, quite easily! In fact, I am surprised that I didn't think of it
sooner."

"Well, tell me."

"It was contained in the revelations telegraphed by that poor
Lavernoux."

"What?"

"Just think, my dear chap, the mistakes in spelling...."

"The mistakes in spelling?"

"Why, of course! They were deliberate. Surely, you don't imagine that
the agent, the private secretary of the baron--who was a
company-promoter, mind you, and a racing-man--did not know English
better than to spell 'necessery' with an 'e,' 'atack' with one 't,'
'ennemy' with two 'n's' and 'prudance' with an 'a'! The thing struck me
at once. I put the four letters together and got 'Etna,' the name of the
famous horse."

"And was that one word enough?"

"Of course! It was enough to start with, to put me on the scent of the
Repstein case, of which all the papers were full, and, next, to make me
guess that it was the key-word of the safe, because, on the one hand,
Lavernoux knew the gruesome contents of the safe and, on the other, he
was denouncing the baron. And it was in the same way that I was led to
suppose that Lavernoux had a friend in the street, that they both
frequented the same cafe, that they amused themselves by working out the
problems and cryptograms in the illustrated papers and that they had
contrived a way of exchanging telegrams from window to window."

"That makes it all quite simple!" I exclaimed.

"Very simple. And the incident once more shows that, in the discovery of
crimes, there is something much more valuable than the examination of
facts, than observations, deductions, inferences and all that stuff and
nonsense. What I mean is, as I said before, intuitio