“I don’t know who you are who tell me ‘We shall have to eat red meat—now’; but if it will interest you to know it—that man is the murderer!”
With which words Daddy Mathieu immediately left us. Rouletabille returned towards the fireplace and said:
“Now we ’ll grill our steak. How do you like the cider?—It ’s a little tart, but I like it.”
We saw no more of Daddy Mathieu that day, and absolute silence reigned in the inn when we left it, after placing five francs on the table in payment for our feast.
Rouletabille at once set off on a three mile walk round Professor Stangerson’s estate. He halted for some ten minutes at the corner of a narrow road black with soot, near to some charcoal-burners’ huts in the forest of Sainte-Geneviève, which touches on the road from Epinay to Corbeil, to tell me that the murderer had certainly passed that way, before entering the grounds and concealing himself in the little clump of trees.
“You don’t think, then, that the keeper knows anything of it?” I asked.
“We shall see that, later,” he replied. “For the present I ’m not interested in what the landlord said about the man. The landlord hates him. I did n’t take you to breakfast at the Donjon Inn for the sake of the Green Man.”
Then Rouletabille, with great precaution glided, followed by me, towards the little building which, standing near the park gate, served for the home of the concierges, who had been arrested that morning. With the skill of an acrobat, he got into the lodge by an upper window which had been left open, and returned ten minutes later. He said only, “Ah!”—a word which, in his mouth, signified many things.
We were about to take the road leading to the château, when a considerable stir at the park gate attracted our attention. A carriage had arrived and some people had come from the château to meet it. Rouletabille pointed out to me a gentleman who descended from it.
“That ’s the Chief of the Sûreté,” he said. “Now we shall see what Frédéric Larsan has up his sleeve, and whether he is so much cleverer than anybody else.”