that our discovery of it in the little inn at Epinay had much
embarrassed him. If you will remember, he told us then that the cane had
been given him in London. Why did we not immediately say to ourselves:
'Fred is lying. He could not have had this cane in London. He was not
in London. He bought it in Paris'? Then you found out, on inquiry at
Cassette's, that the cane had been bought by a person dressed very like
Robert Darzac, though, as we learned later, from Darzac himself, it was
not he who had made the purchase. Couple this with the fact we already
knew, from the letter at the poste restante, that there was actually
a man in Paris who was passing as Robert Darzac, why did we not
immediately fix on Fred himself?

"Of course, his position at the Surete was against us; but when we saw
the evident eagerness on his part to find convicting evidence against
Darzac, nay, even the passion he displayed in his pursuit of the man,
the lie about the cane should have had a new meaning for us. If you
ask why Larsan bought the cane, if he had no intention of manufacturing
evidence against Darzac by means of it, the answer is quite simple. He
had been wounded in the hand by Mademoiselle Stangerson, so that the
cane was useful to enable him to close his hand in carrying it. You
remember I noticed that he always carried it?

"All these details came back to my mind when I had once fixed on Larsan
as the criminal. But they were too late then to be of any use to me. On
the evening when he pretended to be drugged I looked at his hand and saw
a thin silk bandage covering the signs of a slight healing wound. Had we
taken a quicker initiative at the time Larsan told us that lie about the
cane, I am certain he would have gone off, to avoid suspicion. All the
same, we worried Larsan or Ballmeyer without our knowing it."

"But," I interrupted, "if Larsan had no intention of using the cane as
evidence against Darzac, why had he made himself up to look like the man
when he went in to buy it?"

"He had not specially 'made up' as Darzac to buy the cane; he had come
straight to Cassette's immediately after he had attacked Mademoiselle
Stangerson. His wound was troubling him and, as he was passing along the
Avenue de l'Opera, the idea of the cane came to his mind and he acted on
it. It was then eight o'clock. And I, who had hit upon the very hour of
the occurrence of the tragedy, almost convinced that Darzac was not the
criminal, and knowing of