“So far, nothing out of the common,” said Don Luis, switching on an electric torch. “Buckets, pick-axes, wheelbarrows, a ladder. . . . Ah! Ah! Just as I expected: rails, a complete set of light rails! . . . Lend me a hand, captain. Let’s clear out the back. Good, that’s done it.”
Level with the ground and opposite the grating was a rectangular opening exactly similar to the one in the basin. The wire was visible above, with a number of hooks hanging from it.
“So this is where the bags arrived,” Don Luis explained. “They dropped, so to speak, into one of the two little trollies which you see over there, in the corner. The rails were laid across the bank, of course at night; and the trollies were pushed to a barge into which they tipped their contents.”
“So that . . . ?”
“So that the French gold went this way . . . anywhere you like . . . somewhere abroad.”
“And you think that the last eighteen hundred bags have also been despatched?”
“I fear so.”
“Then we are too late?”
Don Luis reflected for a while without answering. Patrice, though disappointed by a development which he had not foreseen, remained amazed at the extraordinary skill with which his companion, in so short a time, had succeeded in unraveling a portion of the tangled skein.
“It’s an absolute miracle,” he said, at last. “How on earth did you do it?”