. . . fall in
a shower. . . . So you hold out your hat or your bag and the gold
comes pouring into it. . . . My bag is full. . . . Would you like to
see?"

She laughed quietly and, beckoning to Simon and Dolores, took her dog
by the scruff of the neck, dropped him on the ground and half-opened
her bag. Then, again in her sing-song voice:

"You are honest folk, aren't you? . . . I wouldn't show it to any one
else. . . . But you won't hurt me."

Dolores and Simon eagerly bent over the bag. With her bony fingers the
old woman first lifted a heap of rags kept there for Dick's benefit;
she then removed a few shiny red and yellow pebbles. Beneath these lay
quite a little hoard of gold coins, of which she seized a generous
handful, making them clink in the hollow of her hand. They were old
coins of all sizes and bearing all sorts of heads.

Simon exclaimed excitedly:

"She comes from there! . . . She has been there!"

And shaking the mad woman by the shoulders, he asked:

"Where is it? How many hours have you been walking? Have you seen a
party of men leading two prisoners, an old man and a girl?"

But the madwoman picked up her dog and closed her bag. She refused to
hear. At the most, as she moved away, she said, or rather sang to the
air of a ballad which the dog accompanied with his barking:

"Men on horseback. . . . They were galloping. . . . It was yesterday.
. . . A girl with fair hair. . . ."

Simon shrugged his shoulders:

"She's wandering. Rolleston has no horses. . . ."

"True," said Dolores, "but, all the same, Miss Bakefield's hair is
fair."

They were much astonished, a little way on, to find that Rolleston's
trail branched off into another trail which came from France and which
had been left by the trampling of many horses--a dozen, Dolores
estimated--whose marks were less recent than the bandits' footprints.
These were evidently the men on horseback whom the madwoman had seen.

Dolores and Simon had only to follow the beaten track displayed before
their eyes on the carpet of moist sand. The region of shells had come
to an end. The plain was strewn with great, absolutely round rocks,
formed by pebbles agglomerated in marl, huge balls polished by all the
submarine currents and deep-sea tides. In the end they were packed so
close together that they constituted an insuperable obstacle, which
the horsemen and then Rolleston had wheeled round.

When Simon and Dolores had passed it, they came to a wi