s tall, young gallant, who, as he saw that he was being
hustled toward a police station, demanded:

"Have you arrested me, and why?"

"First for having struck me," Bernardet replied, still bareheaded, and
to whom a gamin now handed his soiled hat, saying to him:

"Is this yours, Monsieur Bernardet?"

Bernardet recognized in his own quarter! That was glory!

The man seemed to wish to defend himself and still struggled, but one
remark of Dagonin's seemed to pacify him:

"No rebellion! There is nothing serious about your arrest. Do not make
it worse."

The young man really believed that it was only a slight matter and he
would be liberated at once. The only thing that disquieted him was that
this intoxicated man, suddenly become sober, had spoken to him as he did
a few moments before in the cabaret.

The four men walked quickly along in the shadow of the buildings,
through the almost deserted streets, where the shopkeepers were putting
out their lights and closing up their shops. Scarcely any one who met
them would have realized that three of these men were taking the fourth
to a police station.

A tri-color flag floated over a door lighted by a red lantern; the four
men entered the place and found themselves in a narrow, warm hall, where
the agents of the police were either sleeping on benches or reading
around the stove by the light of the gas jets above their heads.

Bernardet, looking dolefully at his broken and soiled hat, begged the
young man to give his name and address to the Chief of the Post. The
young man then quickly understood that his questioner of the Cabaret du
Squelette had caught him in a trap. He looked at him with an expression
of violent anger--of concentrated rage.

Then he said:

"My name? What do you want of that? I am an honest man. Why did you
arrest me? What does it mean?"

"Your name?" repeated Bernardet.

The man hesitated.

"Oh, well! I am called Prades. Does that help you any?"

The man wrote: "Prades. P-r-a-d-e-s with an accent. Prades. First name?"

"Charles, if you wish!"

"Oh!" said Bernardet, noticing the slight difference in the tone of his
answer. "We wish nothing. We wish only the truth."

"I have told it."

Charles Prades furnished some further information in regard to himself.
He was staying at a hotel in the Rue de Paradis-Poissonsiere, a small
hotel used by commercial travelers and merchants of the second class. He
had been in Paris only a month.

Where