He turned to Davanne, whose machine was beginning to block the traffic, and asked:

"Can we start?"

"Whenever you like. Where are we going?"

Paying no attention to the movements of the people coming from every side, Don Luis unfolded his map of France and spread it out before him.

He experienced a few seconds of anxiety at seeing the complicated tangle of roads and picturing the infinite number of places to which the villain might carry Florence. But he pulled himself together. He did not allow himself to hesitate. He refused even to reflect.

He was determined to find out, and to find out everything, at once, without clues, without useless consideration, simply by the marvellous intuition which invariably guided him at any crisis in his life.

And his self-respect also required that he should give Davanne his answer without delay, and that the disappearance of those whom he was pursuing should not seem to embarra.s.s him. With his eyes glued to the map, he placed one finger on Paris and another on Le Mans and, even before he had asked himself why the scoundrel had chosen that Paris-Le Mans-Angers route, he knew the answer to the question.

The name of a town had struck him and made the truth appear like a flash of lightning: Alencon! Then and there, by the light of his memory, he penetrated the mystery.

He repeated:

"Where are we going? Back again, bearing to the left."

"Any particular place?"

"Alencon."

"All right," said Davanne. "Lend a hand, some of you. I can make an easy start from that field just there."

Don Luis and a few others helped him, and the preparations were soon made. Davanne tested his engine. Everything was in perfect order.

At that moment a powerful racing car, with a siren yelling like a vicious animal, came tearing along the Angers Road and promptly stopped. Three men got out and rushed up to the driver of the yellow taxicab. Don Luis recognized them. They were Weber, the deputy chief, and the men who had taken him to the lockup the night before, sent by the Prefect of Police to follow up the scoundrel's tracks.

They had a brief interchange of words with the cab-driver, which seemed to put them out; and they kept on gesticulating and plying him with fresh questions while looking at their watches and consulting their road maps.

Don Luis went up to them. He was unrecognizable, with his head wrapped in his aviation cap and his face concealed by his goggles. Changing his voice:

"The birds have flown, Mr. Deputy Chief," he said.

Weber looked at him in utter amazement,

Don Luis grinned.

"Yes, flown. Our friend from the Ile Saint Louis is an artful dodger, you know. My lord's in his third motor. After the yellow car of which you heard at Versailles last night, he took another at Le Mans--destination unknown."

The deputy chief opened his eyes in amazement. Who was this person who was mentioning facts that had been telephoned to police headquarters only at two o'clock that morning? He gasped:

"But who are you, Monsieur?"

"What? Don't you know me? What's the good of making appointments with people? You strain every nerve to be punctual, and then they ask you who you are! Come, Weber, confess that you're doing it to annoy me. Must you gaze on my features in broad daylight? Here goes!"

He raised his mask.

"a.r.s.ene Lupin!" spluttered the detective.

"At your service, young fellow: on foot, in the saddle, and in mid air.

That's where I'm going now. Good-bye."

And so great was Weber's astonishment at seeing a.r.s.ene Lupin, whom he had taken to the lockup twelve hours before, standing in front of him, free, at two hundred and forty miles from Paris, that Don Luis, as he went back to Davanne, thought:

"What a crusher! I've knocked him out in one round. There's no hurry. The referee will count ten at least three times before Weber can say 'Mother!'"

Davanne was ready. Don Luis climbed into the monoplane. The peasants pushed at the wheels. The machine started.

"North-northeast," Don Luis ordered. "Ninety miles an hour. Ten thousand francs."

"We've the wind against us," said Davanne.

"Five thousand francs extra for the wind," shouted Don Luis.

He admitted no obstacle in his haste to reach Damigni. He now understood the whole thing and, harking back to the very beginning, he was surprised that his mind had never perceived the connection between the two skeletons hanging in the barn and the series of crimes resulting from the Mornington inheritance. Stranger still, how was it that the almost certain murder of Langernault, Hippolyte Fauville's old friend, had not afforded him all the clues which it contained? The crux of the sinister plot lay in that.

Who could have intercepted, on Fauville's behalf, the letters of accusation which Fauville was supposed to write to his old friend Langernault, except some one in the village or some one who had lived in the village?

And now everything was clear. It was the nameless scoundrel who had started his career of crime by killing old Langernault and then the Dedessuslamare couple. The method was the same as later on: it was not direct murder, but anonymous murder, murder by suggestion. Like Mornington the American, like Fauville the engineer, like Marie, like Gaston Sauverand, old Langernault had been craftily done away with and the Dedessuslamare couple driven to commit suicide in the barn.

It was from there that the tiger had come to Paris, where later he was to find Fauville and Cosmo Mornington and plot the tragic affair of the inheritance.

And it was there that he was now returning!

There was no doubt about that. To begin with, the fact that he had administered a narcotic to Florence const.i.tuted an indisputable proof.

Was he not obliged to put Florence to sleep in order to prevent her from recognizing the landscape at Alencon and Damigni, or the Old Castle, which she had explored with Gaston Sauverand?

On the other hand, the Le Mans-Angers-Nantes route, which had been taken to put the police on a false track, meant only an extra hour or two, at most, for any one motoring to Alencon. Lastly, that coach-house near a big town, that limousine waiting, ready charged with petrol, showed that the villain, when he intended to visit his retreat, took the precaution of stopping at Le Mans, in order to go from there, in his limousine, to Langernault's deserted estate.

He would therefore reach his lair at ten o'clock that morning. And he would arrive there with Florence Leva.s.seur dead asleep!

The question forced itself upon him, the terrible persistent question--what did he mean to do with Florence Leva.s.seur?

"Faster! Faster!" cried Don Luis.

Now that he knew the scoundrel's haunt, the man's scheme became hideously evident to him. Feeling himself hunted down, lost, an object of hatred and terror to Florence, whose eyes were now opened to the true state of things, what plan could he have in mind except his invariable plan of murder?

"Faster!" cried Don Luis. "We're making no headway. Go faster, can't you?"

Florence murdered! Perhaps the crime was not yet accomplished. No, it could not be! Killing takes time. It is preceded by words, by the offer of a bargain, by threats, by entreaties, by a wholly unspeakable scene.

But the thing was being prepared, Florence was going to die!

Florence was going to die by the hand of the brute who loved her. For he loved her: Don Luis had an intuition of that monstrous love; and he was bound to believe that such a love could only end in torture and bloodshed.

Sable ... Sille-le-Guillaume....