Edmond Laforce, the Duke of Benoit du Sault, picked his jeweled cane from the table, and rose to his feet. Frank rose, also, and their eyes met again.
“I will not offer my hand again, as we know not what eyes are on us,” said the duke. “Till to-morrow night—or forever—farewell!”
He turned, and walked away, and Frank Merriwell returned to his hotel, to think of the strange things he had heard, and to wonder if they could be true. The following morning, he read in Figaro that the Duke of Benoit du Sault had been found dead in his bed. The report stated that it was plainly and undoubtedly a case of heart failure, but Frank Merriwell knew that it was murder!
He sat staring at the paper in a dazed way, thinking of his meeting with the doomed man the previous night, and all the strange things the duke had told him across the little table in front of the Café de la Paix. Now he knew beyond a doubt that the Black Brothers had found another victim. The strange pains Laforce had felt were but the warnings of his coming dissolution.
There was something uncanny and terrible about it, something that gave a chill to Frank Merriwell’s warm blood. Surely, the enemies of the prisoner of Devil’s Island were ready to resort to any extreme of crime to keep the friends of the unfortunate man from securing justice for him. They counted human lives as nothing in their terrible work.
And that was France—happy France.
From the first, Frank had felt sympathy for Dreyfus, and now it seemed that he was in some way connected with the miserable captive in the iron cage on that dread island. He felt in his pocket for the tiny metal ball given him by Edmond Laforce. It was there. He took it out, and examined it closely, for the first time. It seemed too light to be a solid piece of metal, and yet he could see no flaw in it, no opening, nothing but the polished surface.
The dead Duke of Benoit du Sault had said that the ball might some day prove the innocence of Dreyfus. How could that be?
Frank asked himself the question, as he sat there with it in his fingers, turning it over and over. Was it not possible that the duke had been mentally unbalanced?
That was a new thought, and it gave the young American a start. Surely, the uncanny story the man had told seemed like the imaginings of a diseased brain, and men had gone mad in France from thinking of the Dreyfus affair. Perhaps the duke had become crazed from brooding over it, and had imagined the story of the Black Brothers, the blood-red star, and the metal ball that was to prove the innocence of the condemned man.