had arrested the songster... "and the 'Salad Basket'[10]
passes in an hour's time! ... I shall just do it!"

[Footnote 10: Prison van.]

* * * * *

"Have you anyone for the Depot to-day?" asked the driver from his high
seat on the prison van. He was on a collecting journey as is usual every
evening, when the Salad Baskets, as they are vulgarly called, pass to
the various police stations of Paris to pick up the individuals arrested
during the day.

"Two of 'em," answered the police sergeant on duty. Whilst official
papers were being interchanged and forms were being filled in according
to rule, policemen went to the cells to bring out the two prisoners to
be despatched to the Depot.

The first to pass out was the costermonger. He was straightway put into
one of the narrow compartments in the Salad Basket. Then it was the turn
of the tipsy and obstreperous workman, who was now silent, moody, and
apparently sober.

"Hop it now!" cried the policeman. "Come along with you, you miserable
drunk!... March now!... Foot it!"

As the "drunk" hit against the partition of the narrow passageway
running up the middle of the Salad Basket, the policeman, with a shove,
pushed him into one of the compartments, carefully shutting the little
door on him and fastening it.

"My word!" he exclaimed. "That fellow wouldn't have been capable of
walking three steps in an hour's time!"

As the driver climbed to his seat on the van, the policeman called out,
with a laugh:

"You have a traveller inside who doesn't detest wine!... It's a pity to
see a man in such a hoggish state!"

This same policeman would have been surprised, could he have seen the
bibulous one's face when the Salad Basket cast loose from her moorings
and started off in the direction of the Point-du-Jour police station,
the last on the round to be visited!

The "drunk" whom one push had sufficed to plant on his seat, had briskly
drawn himself upright and was smiling broadly, a wide, noiseless smile!

"What a joke!... And what a jolly good actor I should have made!"
thought Jerome Fandor, giving himself a mental hug of satisfaction....
"Ah! They arrest the individuals I want to set talking!... The police
imagine they are going to push in first and find out the answer to the
riddle!... We shall see!"

Fandor was listening intensely and trying to discover from the movements
of the Salad Basket what street they were passing along.

"Sm