“They must have had a swift vessel with steam up waiting at Dover. There’s no end to their resources when anything big is at stake. We’re in for a race, George.”
“You take it pretty coolly,” said George, who was quivering with excitement.
“That’s the first lesson I learnt from my chief. ‘Never get flustered,’ he dinned into me. We shall have to trust to the speed of your car. They don’t know where we are, nor which way we are going, which is one to us. Get on with your breakfast; I’ll think it out.”
He ate his omelet with an air of abstraction. After a few minutes he called the waiter.
“Have you got a road-guide?” he asked.
“Yes, sir: I will fetch it.”
He soon returned with a copy of the Guide Taride. Maurice glanced at the title page: “Les Routes de France, à l’usage des conducteurs d’automobiles et cyclistes.”
“The very thing. I will buy this, waiter; the proprietor can easily replace it. It gives everything we want, George.”
He turned over the pages until he came to the section dealing with the roads out of Paris.
“They’ll watch the bridges, as they did in London,” he said, “but they can’t watch all the gates, unless they have a much larger number of men than is likely. We mustn’t cross the river, so we can’t take any of the three roads to Marseilles; they all go by the Porte de Choisy, and that’s on the other side of the Seine. Here we are: Paris to Melun, forty kilometres. They don’t recommend the first route, by the Porte Daumesnil and the Bois de Vincennes, so we’ll choose that. We shall join the direct road at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, thirteen kilometres distant. And the sooner we start the better. Go and set your gyroscopes working, while I pay the bill.”