“Listen to me!” he said, “all this is very bewildering, so bewildering in fact, that we are forgetting our logic. There is one step we must take instantly. Monsieur Havard, in coming to see your colleague, to see Mr. Tom Bob, we have made a blunder; it is elsewhere we must go now. By the Lord, we shall soon see if Juve is wounded, we shall soon find out whether he telephoned this morning, whether he can go this evening!”
Before the great man had done speaking, M. Havard had clapped on his hat again and slipped on his top-coat.
“You are right, Monsieur le Ministre,” he declared, “let us go there at once.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE PRISONER OF THE SANTÉ
It was the hour of general réveillée at the prison of La Santé. Along the corridors, still in semi-darkness, tramped the warders, jangling their ponderous bunches of keys, on their way to wake the prisoners for the morning meal. Before the door of the cell where Juve was confined, Hervé, the turnkey, usually entrusted with the surveillance of the ex-detective, stood hesitating, only finally making up his mind to go in on hearing the step of a chief warder at the far end of the paved passage.
The door turned slowly on its hinges. As a rule the sound of the key turning in the lock was the signal for Juve to start wide awake and sit up in his bed, in eager expectation of ... what? Perhaps his release! But alas! morning after morning the apparition of the turnkey’s sullen countenance only brought bitter disappointment with it.
But this morning the prisoner did not wake; he was sleeping heavily and, if appearances were to be trusted, very uneasily. He kept groaning and crying out peevishly, muttering incoherently, twisting and turning in his bed, waving about his arms, one of which showed stains of blood, blood that had run down in two red rivulets over his torn shirt and marked the white sheet with little brown spots.
Hervé approached the bed and stood looking down at the sleeper. The turnkey showed no particular signs of surprise at seeing the condition his prisoner was in, but wore rather the preoccupied look of a man who cannot make up his mind to one course of action more than another. Eventually, he shook the sleeper roughly, hauled him up by the shoulder into a sitting posture, and when the prisoner, though still looking dazed and rubbing his eyes sleepily, seemed more or less awake, apostrophized him angrily:
“What’s wrong with you? where does that blood come from?”
“Blood? Where do you see any blood?”