oning what he had called his trail of
the Woman in Black, he abruptly whirled about and quickly invented a
sensational biography of the newcomer. Charles-Henri Prades, or rather
Carlos Prades, as he called himself, had been a _gaucho_, a buffalo
tamer, a cowboy, using, turn by turn, the American revolver against the
Redskins and the Mexican lasso against the Yankees.

The journalist had obtained a signature, picked up by the lodging-house
keeper where the guilty man had been hunted down, and published in his
paper the autographic characters; he had deduced from them some dramatic
observations. Cooper, of former times; Gustave Aymard, of yesterday;
Rudyard Kipling or Bret Harte, of to-day, had never met a personage more
dreadful, and at the same time more heroic. Carlos Prades used the
navaja (Spanish knife) with the terrible rapidity of a Catalan. He had
felt since the days of Buenos Ayres a fierce hate for the ex-Consul, and
this crime, which some of his brother reporters, habitually
indifferently informed (it was Paul Rodier who spoke), now attributed
alone to the avarice of this Cambrioleur from over the sea; he, Rodier,
gave this note as the cause of vengeance, and built thereupon a romance
which made his readers shiver. Or, rather, he said nothing outright. He
permitted one a glimpse into, he outlined, one knows not what, dark
history. Soon he made this Carlos Prades the instrument and the arm of
an association of vengeance. He could even believe that there was
anarchy in the affair. Then he had the young man mixed in some love
affair, a drama of passion, with Argentine Republic for the theatre.

As a result he had succeeded in making interesting the man whom
Bernardet had pushed a few nights before into the station house.

And, what was a singular thing, the reporter had divined part of the
truth. It was still another episode in his past that Rovere expiated
when he found himself one day, in his salon in the Boulevard de Clichy,
face to face with the man who was to be his murderer. At Buenos Ayres,
the ex-Consul had been associated in a large agricultural enterprise
with a man whose hazardous speculations, play and various adventures had
completely ruined him, and who had left two children--a young girl whom
Rovere thought for a moment of marrying, and a son, younger--poor beings
of whom the Consul, paying his partner's debts, seemed the natural
protector. Jean Prades, in committing suicide--he had killed himself