s half-way across the hall and running for the door. I
raced wildly across the court and toward the terrace.

The meaning of the scheme was clear. Jacqueline was on Captain
Duhamel's boat, which sailed at nine. And only twenty minutes remained
to me. If I had not had the good luck to meet Dubois!

I must have noticed a clock somewhere during the minute that I was in
the chateau, and though I had not been conscious of it, the after-image
loomed before my eyes. As I ran now I could see a huge phantom clock,
the dial marked with enormous Roman letters, and the hands moving with
dreadful swiftness toward the hour of nine.

I had underestimated Leroux's shrewdness. He must have telegraphed
instructions from New York before my train was out of the county,
secured the boat, laid his plans during his journey northward, and had
me struck down while Jacqueline was stolen from my care. And he had
spared no details, even to enlisting the aid of Pere Antoine.

If he had known that my destination was the same as his, he might have
waited. But it was not the character of the man to wait, any more than
it was to participate personally in his schemes. He worked through
others, sitting back and pulling the strings, and he struck, each blow
on time.

I ought to have known that. I should have read him better. I had
always dawdled. I trusted to the future, instead of acting. What
chance had I against a mind like his?

I was a novice at chess, pitting myself against a master at the game.

I must have been running aimlessly up and down the terrace, blindly
searching for a road down to the lower town, for a man seized me by the
sleeve, and I looked into the face of the hotel clerk again. He seemed
to realize that more was the matter even than my appearance indicated,
for he asked no questions, but apparently divined my movements.

"This way!" he said, and hurried me to a sort of subway entrance, and
down a flight of steps. Before me I saw the turnstile which led to a
cable railway. He paid my fare and thrust me into a car. A boy came
to close the latticed door.

"Wait!" I gasped. "Who was it that called?"

"The man with the mustache who asked for you--about whom you inquired."

I turned away. I had thought it was Leroux. Of course it had not been
he.

The car glided down the cliff, and stopped a few seconds later, I
emerged through another turnstile and found myself in the lower town
again at the foot of the p