southern boundary of the Causse Larzac, then laboriously
climbed up to the plateau itself; and Lanyard roused to the fact that
he was approaching familiar ground from a new angle: the next stop
would be Combe-Redonde.

The day was still in its infancy when that halt was made. Aside from
the station agent, not a soul waited upon the platform. But one or two
passengers were set down and, as the engine began to snort anew, a man
darted from behind the tiny structure that housed ticket-office and
waiting-room, galloped heavily across the platform, and with nothing to
spare threw himself into the compartment immediately behind that
wherein Lanyard sat alone.

This manoeuvre was performed so briskly and unexpectedly that Lanyard
caught barely a glimpse of the fellow; but one glimpse was enough to
convince him he had been wrong in assuming that Monsieur Albert Dupont
had sneaked back to Paris to hide from the authorities after failing to
assassinate Andre Duchemin more than three weeks ago.

But why--assuming one were not misled by a chance likeness to that
heavy but athletic figure so well-remembered--why had Dupont lingered
so long in the neighbourhood, in hourly peril of arrest? And why this
sudden departure in the chill break of dawn, a move so timed and
executed that it wore every sign of haste and fear?

No reasonable explanation offered in solution of either of these
riddles; unless, indeed, it were reasonable to believe that lust for
vengeance was the ruling passion in the Dupont nature, that the
creature had hung about the chateau in hope of getting another chance
at Duchemin, and had decided to give it up only on discovering
--inexplicably, at this hour--that the latter had stolen
away under cover of night. But Lanyard didn't believe that. Neither did
he believe that Dupont had had any hand in the robbery of night before
last, and was now in tardy flight. In truth, he didn't know what to
think, and the wildest flights of an imagination provoked by this
mystery were tame and timid in contrast with the truth as he was later
to learn it.

To an amateur in sensations there was true piquancy in the thought that
one was travelling in company with a thug who had already had two tries
for one's life and would not hesitate to essay a third; in the same
coach, separated only by the thin partition between the compartments,
safe only in the thug's unconsciousness of one's proximity! And this
without the privilege of denou