THE ENEMIES

"Poor boy!" murmured Lupin, when his eyes fell on Gilbert's letter next
morning. "How he must feel it!"

On the very first day when he saw him, he had taken a liking to that
well-set-up youngster, so careless, gay and fond of life. Gilbert was
devoted to him, would have accepted death at a sign from his master.
And Lupin also loved his frankness, his good humour, his simplicity, his
bright, open face.

"Gilbert," he often used to say, "you are an honest man. Do you know,
if I were you, I should chuck the business and become an honest man for
good."

"After you, governor," Gilbert would reply, with a laugh.

"Won't you, though?"

"No, governor. An honest man is a chap who works and grinds. It's a
taste which I may have had as a nipper; but they've made me lose it
since."

"Who's they?"

Gilbert was silent. He was always silent when questioned about his
early life; and all that Lupin knew was that he had been an orphan since
childhood and that he had lived all over the place, changing his name
and taking up the queerest jobs. The whole thing was a mystery which no
one had been able to fathom; and it did not look as though the police
would make much of it either.

Nor, on the other hand, did it look as though the police would consider
that mystery a reason for delaying proceedings. They would send
Vaucheray's accomplice for trial--under his name of Gilbert or any other
name--and visit him with the same inevitable punishment.

"Poor boy!" repeated Lupin. "They're persecuting him like this only
because of me. They are afraid of his escaping and they are in a hurry
to finish the business: the verdict first and then... the execution.

"Oh, the butchers!... A lad of twenty, who has committed no murder, who
is not even an accomplice in the murder..."

Alas, Lupin well knew that this was a thing impossible to prove and that
he must concentrate his efforts upon another point. But upon which? Was
he to abandon the trail of the crystal stopper?

He could not make up his mind to that. His one and only diversion from
the search was to go to Enghien, where the Growler and the Masher lived,
and make sure that nothing had been seen of them since the murder at the
Villa Marie-Therese. Apart from this, he applied himself to the question
of Daubrecq and nothing else.

He refused even to trouble his head about the problems set before him:
the treachery of the Growler and the Masher; their connection with the
g