Where was he off to? Fandor took prompt measures to find out, and the other had not gone three hundred paces before his steps were being dogged by the pursuing journalist. The pace was hot. It was plain that Fantômas’ man of business was bent on completing before daylight whatever the job it was he had made up his mind to do. But to manage it he must make all possible haste, for, as Moche had noted, it was by now three o’clock in the morning.
“God Almighty!” Fandor swore, pressing on harder still, “what a racer the scoundrel is!... Where are we? We’re clean through Alfort, and there’s nothing else but that hovel ahead there; it looks deserted, but it’s that way and nowhere else Moche is making across country. Ah, ha! I think I’m going to know!”
Moche, in fact, was making straight for a tumble-down building that stood empty and abandoned in the middle of a wide stretch of waste ground, its shutters hanging from their hinges, its walls dropping to pieces, and a general look of poverty-stricken dilapidation brooding over all. Like a person familiar with the locality and having a perfect right to march in without knocking, he pushed open the door, a strong and heavy one. Still, the idea occurred to him that tramps might have taken refuge in the ramshackle hut for shelter from the cold out of doors; so he took his revolver in hand, and in he went.
The old usurer reclosed the door behind him; then Fandor, who had been crouching to the ground, advanced with a thousand precautions, glued his ear to the door, made certain that the outermost room was unoccupied, and opening in his turn, made his way silently into the lonely house. Neither did he fail to hold his trusty Browning ready for action. At first he had some difficulty in making out just where Moche could be, but soon, noticing a feeble, almost imperceptible glimmer of light that filtered up through the floor, he realized that the old usurer was in a cellar, and had pulled to after him the trap-door by which he had gained access. Fandor threw himself flat on the trap-door in question and peeped through the cracks between the boards.
But what he saw went far beyond anything he had expected. By the light of a lantern he had unhooked from the wall Moche, having first deposited his precious money-chest on the floor, was busy raising with infinite caution one of the paving-stones in the north corner of the cellar.
“Evidently,” the journalist thought to himself, “he wants to re-bury his treasure in a new place!”
And such was in fact the old reprobate’s intention. In the hiding place he had opened up he now proceeded carefully to place the chest; then he replaced the flagstone, then he scattered sand and dust all round the edges, so that it was soon quite impossible to guess that the stone had ever been disturbed.
Meantime Fandor had moved from his spying place; Moche was about to take his departure and he must not catch sight of the intruder. The journalist’s first idea was simply to leave the ruined house before the old ruffian; but on second thoughts he realized that such a mode of departure was full of risk.
“Once outside, I shall be on the bare, deserted road, and Moche will inevitably see me—and that will never do!” But now a happy thought struck the young man—Moche, never for one moment suspecting the presence of anyone spying on his actions, would probably not trouble to search the rooms. All he himself would have to do would be to hide, let the old man go out first, then slip away after him quietly and in perfect safety.
A few minutes more and Fandor, concealed behind a forgotten pile of firewood, saw Moche emerge again from the cellar. The old fellow crossed the outer room, reached the door and so away.