Checking his headlong course at the top of the terrace steps, Fantômas rapidly entered the house, then double-locked himself in. The ruffian at once inspected the fastenings of the windows and doors on the ground floor.
The monster cocked his ear. Three calls of the horn sounded dolefully in the silence of the night. Fantômas counted them anxiously and then exclaimed:
"There! That's my signal! My driver is taken."
A slight shudder shook the sturdy frame of the man. He went up to the first floor and peered through the shutters. He caught the sound of footsteps. In the light of a street lamp he suddenly descried the outline of his driver. The latter, among half a score of policemen, was walking, head bent, with his hands fettered.
"Poor fellow!" he murmured. "Another who has to pay! Ah! they have left my 'sixty horse' for my use presently. But there is no time to lose, I'll bet that Juve, flanked by his everlasting journalist, will not be long in coming here. Very well! Juve, it is not as master that you will enter this house, but as a doomed man!"
Fantômas now became absorbed in a strange task which claimed all his attention. On the floor of the dark closet where all the electric gear of the house terminated, the bandit laid a sort of oblong fusee that he drew from his capacious cloak.
He fitted to the end of this fusee two electric wires previously freed of their insulator; then having verified the tie of the pulls of the distribution board, he hid the cartridge under a little lid of wood. Then he left the closet, taking care to double-lock the door.
"These detectives," he growled, "are about to witness the finest firework display imaginable and, I dare say, take part in it, too. Dynamite can transform a respectable middle-class house into a sparkling bouquet of loose stone!"
Such was, indeed, the fearful reception Fantômas held in reserve for his opponents. He had made everything ready to blow up the house and escape unhurt himself.
If Juve and Fandor had paid more attention to the piping of the wires, they would have seen that some of them ran outside the house and disappeared below ground, reappearing at the far end of the property in an old deserted woodshed.