The Teeth of the Tiger. Морис Леблан

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СКАЧАТЬ bed, and laid the sheets and blankets. Next, at his master's orders, he brought a jug of water, a glass, a plate of biscuits, and a dish of fruit.

      M. Fauville ate a couple of biscuits and then cut a dessert-apple. It was not ripe. He took two others, felt them, and, not thinking them good, put them back as well. Then he peeled a pear and ate it.

      "You can leave the fruit dish," he said to his man. "I shall be glad of it, if I am hungry during the night. … Oh, I was forgetting! These two gentlemen are staying. Don't mention it to anybody. And, in the morning, don't come until I ring."

      The man placed the fruit dish on the table before retiring. Perenna, who was noticing everything, and who was afterward to remember every smallest detail of that evening, which his memory recorded with a sort of mechanical faithfulness, counted three pears and four apples in the dish.

      Meanwhile, Fauville went up the winding staircase, and, going along the gallery, reached the room where his son lay in bed.

      "He's fast asleep," he said to Perenna, who had joined him.

      The bedroom was a small one. The air was admitted by a special system of ventilation, for the dormer window was hermetically closed by a wooden shutter tightly nailed down.

      "I took the precaution last year," Hippolyte Fauville explained. "I used to make my electrical experiments in this room and was afraid of being spied upon, so I closed the aperture opening on the roof."

      And he added in a low voice:

      "They have been prowling around me for a long time."

      The two men went downstairs again.

      Fauville looked at his watch.

      "A quarter past ten: bedtime, I am exceedingly tired, and you will excuse me—"

      It was arranged that Perenna and Mazeroux should make themselves comfortable in a couple of easy chairs which they carried into the passage between the study and the entrance hall. But, before bidding them good-night, Hippolyte Fauville, who, although greatly excited, had appeared until then to retain his self-control, was seized with a sudden attack of weakness. He uttered a faint cry. Don Luis turned round and saw the sweat pouring like gleaming water down his face and neck, while he shook with fever and anguish.

      "What's the matter?" asked Perenna.

      "I'm frightened! I'm frightened!" he said.

      "This is madness!" cried Don Luis. "Aren't we here, the two of us? We can easily spend the night with you, if you prefer, by your bedside."

      Fauville replied by shaking Perenna violently by the shoulder, and, with distorted features, stammering:

      "If there were ten of you—if there were twenty of you with me, you need not think that it would spoil their schemes! They can do anything they please, do you hear, anything! They have already killed Inspector Vérot—they will kill me—and they will kill my son. Oh, the blackguards! My God, take pity on me! The awful terror of it! The pain I suffer!"

      He had fallen on his knees and was striking his breast and repeating:

      "O God, have pity on me! I can't die! I can't let my son die! Have pity on me, I beseech Thee!"

      He sprang to his feet and led Perenna to a glass-fronted case, which he rolled back on its brass castors, revealing a small safe built into the wall.

      "You will find my whole story here, written up day by day for the past three years. If anything should happen to me, revenge will be easy."

      He hurriedly turned the letters of the padlock and, with a key which he took from his pocket, opened the safe.

      It was three fourths empty; but on one of the shelves, between some piles of papers, was a diary bound in drab cloth, with a rubber band round it. He took the diary, and, emphasizing his words, said:

      "There, look, it's all in here. With this, the hideous business can be reconstructed. … There are my suspicions first and then my certainties. … Everything, everything … how to trap them and how to do for them. … You'll remember, won't you? A diary bound in drab cloth. … I'm putting it back in the safe."

      Gradually his calmness returned. He pushed back the glass case, tidied a few papers, switched on the electric lamp above his bed, put out the lights in the middle of the ceiling, and asked Don Luis and Mazeroux to leave him.

      Don Luis, who was walking round the room and examining the iron shutters of the two windows, noticed a door opposite the entrance door and asked the engineer about it.

      "I use it for my regular clients," said Fauville, "and sometimes I go out that way."

      "Does it open on the garden?"

      "Yes."

      "Is it properly closed?"

      "You can see for yourself; it's locked and bolted with a safety bolt.

       Both keys are on my bunch; so is the key of the garden gate."

      He placed the bunch of keys on the table with his pocket-book and, after first winding it, his watch.

      Don Luis, without troubling to ask permission, took the keys and unfastened the lock and the bolt. A flight of three steps brought him to the garden. He followed the length of the narrow border. Through the ivy he saw and heard the two policemen pacing up and down the boulevard. He tried the lock of the gate. It was fastened.

      "Everything's all right," he said when he returned, "and you can be easy.

       Good-night."

      "Good-night," said the engineer, seeing Perenna and Mazeroux out.

      Between his study and the passage were two doors, one of which was padded and covered with oilcloth. On the other side, the passage was separated from the hall by a heavy curtain.

      "You can go to sleep," said Perenna to his companion. "I'll sit up."

      "But surely, Chief, you don't think that anything's going to happen!"

      "I don't think so, seeing the precautions which we've taken. But, knowing Inspector Vérot as you did, do you think he was the man to imagine things?"

      "No, Chief."

      "Well, you know what he prophesied. That means that he had his reasons for doing so. And therefore I shall keep my eyes open."

      "We'll take it in turns, Chief; wake me when it's my time to watch."

      Seated motionlessly, side by side, they exchanged an occasional remark. Soon after, Mazeroux fell asleep. Don Luis remained in his chair without moving, his ears pricked up. Everything was quiet in the house. Outside, from time to time, the sound of a motor car or of a cab rolled by. He could also hear the late trains on the Auteuil line.

      He rose several times and went up to the door. Not a sound. Hippolyte

       Fauville was evidently asleep.

      "Capital!" said Perenna to himself. "The boulevard is watched. No one can enter the room except СКАЧАТЬ