just perused.

"About the middle of this story" (the footnote said) "I found a few
words in brackets that seem to have no connection with the tale. They
are in French--foreigner's French and faulty--but they appear to mean:
'We are imprisoned in the garret under the leads of the long wing of the
chateau. Our food will last only another day.'" This laconic footnote
was initialled "H. F. (translator)."

The Commissary's eye brightened. Here at last was something, and
something good. Rapidly he made his plans. He would start in twenty
minutes with six men; he would advise Toussaint by telephone to meet
him at the chateau with six more. The case would prove, perhaps,
vastly important. He saw decorations and Paris employment; he read
in imagination columns of praise in the great papers of the capital.
Quitting unwillingly the realm of ambitious fancy, he took up the
telephone, but before he could speak there came a sharp knock at the
door, and a gendarme stood awaiting permission to address his superior.

"What is it?" demanded M. Lesueur.

"A tramp, sir," replied the gendarme.

"God in heaven, man! What do I care for a tramp? Is this a workhouse?
Send him away and go after him!"

"He has found two Englishmen in a dungeon," observed the gendarme with
wooden persistence.

"Let him join them!" snapped M. Lesueur, angrily. Then the next moment,
"What do you say? Englishmen? Where? What dungeon?"

"He asks leave to make his deposition, sir. He is not an ordinary
tramp."

For a moment the commissary hesitated. The memory of those words
interpolated in the third of the mysterious stories checked his
impatience. Never neglect possible information.

"Bring him in," he said shortly, and replaced the telephone receiver
that, all this while and to the intense irritation of the exchange, he
had held vaguely in his hand.

There was ushered in a lean, scarecrow figure at whose heels (despite
scuffling protests from the gendarme without) limped a black, untidy
dog. The tramp bowed and began at once to speak in the slow correct
French of a well-educated foreigner. He told of a dusty road along which
he had toiled; of a coppice and its tempting shade; of the drowsiness
of afternoon; of dream voices that were not, after all, of dream; of a
mound with a mysterious grating; of a subterranean cavern and its two
unusual and impatient prisoners. M. Lesueur listened in silence. The
story done, he took up the telephone once again. Whi