“No,” said Ralph, not wishing to spoil the girl’s happiness. “I expect that he remained at home, in the village, out of sorts perhaps—always supposing that he has not forgotten the appointment.”
It was a poor excuse; and Aurelie did not appear satisfied by it. He guessed that, after all the emotion she had felt and all the anguish from which he had freed her, she was thinking of the things which still remained obscure and that she was still troubled by not understanding them.
“Let’s be going,” she said.
They climbed up to the ruined hut where the two crooks had encamped the night before. Ralph proposed to go from it to the high wall through which the shepherds had driven their flocks.
As they came round a rock near it she drew Ralph’s attention to a good-sized bundle. A canvas sack resting on the edge of the cliff. [[313]]
“It looks as if it moved,” she said.
Ralph glanced at it, told her to stay where she was, and ran to it. An idea had suddenly struck him.
On reaching the edge of the cliff he seized the sack and thrust his hand into it. Out of it he drew the head and then the body of a child. At once he recognized Jodot’s little confederate, the boy whom the crook carried with him like a ferret and set hunting in cellars and through gratings and palings.
The child was half asleep. Ralph, furious, suddenly solved the problem which had so puzzled him.
He shook the child and said: “You little blighter! You followed us from the Rue de Courcelles! What? Jodot managed to hide you on the luggage rack of my car. And you traveled like that to Clermont-Ferrand, and sent him a post-card from there! Confess it! Or I’ll spank you!”