The report of a pistol rang out. It came from inside the room. The Man in Grey was leaning his full weight against the door, wondering whether Lefèvre and his men would come to his assistance before the trapped Chouans had time to burst the panels.
He heard Lefèvre's call outside and the heavy tramp of the men. A few seconds of agonising suspense, whilst he literally felt the massive door heaving behind him under the furious onslaught of the imprisoned Chouans, and the commissary with the men of the police burst into the hall. The door fell in with a terrific crash.
The Chouans, caught like foxes run to earth, offered a desperate resistance. But the odds were too great; after a grim struggle across the threshold, which lasted close on ten minutes and left several men of the police bleeding or dead upon the floor, the gang was captured, securely bound and locked in one of the cellars underneath the house, where they were left in charge of half a dozen men until such time as they could be conveyed to Alençon and thence to Bicêtre to await their trial.
VI
It has been impossible, owing to the maze of records, to disentangle the subsequent history of three of these Chouans. The Spaniard, however, was, we know, kept in prison for over five years until, after the Restoration, her friends succeeded in laying her petition of release before the King and she was granted a free pardon and a small pension from the privy purse, "in consideration of the services she had rendered to His Majesty and the martyrdom she had suffered in his cause." On the official list of pensioners in the year 1816 her name appears as "Caroline Mercier, commonly called the Spaniard."
But at Chéron's farm, when all was still, the men of the police gone and the prisoners safely under lock and key, the Man in Grey and the commissary returned to the little room which had been the scene of the Chouans' final stand. A broken chair was lying by the side of the tall, open chimney, wherein the woman with the swarthy skin and jet-black eyes had concealed the stolen treasure. The accredited agent had no difficulty in finding the secret hiding-place; about a foot up the chimney an iron door was let into the solid wall. A little manipulation of his deft fingers soon released the secret spring, and the metal panel glided gently in its grooves.
M. de Kerblay's precious ring and some twenty thousand francs in money gladdened the sight of the worthy commissary of police.
"But how did you guess?" he asked of the Man in Grey, when, half an hour later, the pair were ambling along the road back towards Alençon.
"While you were getting ready for our second expedition, my dear Monsieur Lefèvre," replied the Man in Grey, "I took the simple precaution of ascertaining whether the farmer Chéron had a wife, a father, and two daughters. Your own records at the commissariat furnished me with this information. From them I learned that though he had a wife, he had no father living, and that he had three grown-up sons, long ago started out into the world. After that, everything became very simple."
"I suppose," quoth the commissary ruefully, "that I ought to have found out about the man Chéron and his family before I went off on that fool's errand."