om at this moment, he will escape by the
right-hand door opening into the boudoir,--or crossing the drawing-room,
he will reach the gallery and I shall lose him. I have him now and in
five minutes more he'll be safer than if I had him in a cage.--What is
he doing there, alone in Mademoiselle Stangerson's room?--What is he
writing? I descend and place the ladder on the ground. Daddy Jacques
follows me. We re-enter the chateau. I send Daddy Jacques to wake
Monsieur Stangerson, and instruct him to await my coming in Mademoiselle
Stangerson's room and to say nothing definite to him before my arrival.
I will go and awaken Frederic Larsan. It's a bore to have to do it, for
I should have liked to work alone and to have carried off all the
honors of this affair myself, right under the very nose of the sleeping
detective. But Daddy Jacques and Monsieur Stangerson are old men, and I
am not yet fully developed. I might not be strong enough. Larsan is used
to wrestling and putting on the handcuffs. He opened his eyes swollen
with sleep, ready to send me flying, without in the least believing in
my reporter's fancies. I had to assure him that the man was there!

"'That's strange!' he said; 'I thought I left him this afternoon in
Paris.'

"He dressed himself in haste and armed himself with a revolver. We stole
quietly into the gallery.

"'Where is he?' Larsan asked.

"'In Mademoiselle Stangerson's room.

"'And--Mademoiselle Stangerson?'

"'She is not in there.'

"'Let's go in.'

"'Don't go there! On the least alarm the man will escape. He has four
ways by which to do it--the door, the window, the boudoir, or the room
in which the women are sleeping.'

"'I'll draw him from below.'

"'And if you fail?--If you only succeed in wounding him--he'll escape
again, without reckoning that he is certainly armed. No, let me direct
the expedition, and I'll answer for everything.'

"'As you like,' he replied, with fairly good grace.

"Then, after satisfying myself that all the windows of the two galleries
were thoroughly secure, I placed Frederic Larsan at the end of the
'off-turning' gallery, before the window which I had found open and had
reclosed.

"'Under no consideration,' I said to him, 'must you stir from this post
till I call you. The chances are even that the man, when he is pursued,
will return to this window and try to save himself that way; for it is
by that way he came in and made a way ready for his flight. You have