“Why, I observe ...”
“But, good Lord, what do you observe?”
“What occurs, Monsieur Fandor! Now look here, is it, yes or no, a logical conclusion that Fantômas was put out by my arrival? Was it, yes or no, logical to conclude that knowing, as everybody knows, thanks to my wireless messages, that I am setting to work to arrest him, while he proposes to terrify Paris and force the Chambers to satisfy his demands, was it, I ask again, logical to suppose that he was going to try to murder me?”
“Logical, why yes; but how did you guess?”
“I argued, Monsieur Fandor; I argued that Fantômas, wishing to murder me, would do it as swiftly as possible; consequently, if I wished to escape his criminal manœuvres, it was advisable to lay a trap for him. The trap consisted in engaging a room here. Fantômas knew of this. How, I cannot say, but Fantômas knows everything. For my part, I knew—knowledge is power—I knew that, on my coming to the Terminus, an attempt was going to be made on my life. What sort of an attempt? I felt uncertain. I suspected the lift—that risk avoided, in revenge I was pretty well convinced, when I entered this room, the room I had engaged in advance, that something was going to happen here. But what? I thought of a poisonous gas infiltrated during the night, and that is why I questioned the waiter about the occupant of the room above. Monsieur Fandor, I told you you had no nose, did I not? The fact is I am astonished that you didn’t, like me, detect in the room a faint smell of burning, of burning tinder.”
Fandor, lost in admiration at the precision of the American detective’s discoveries, the nature of which he was beginning to fathom, declared: “I noticed the smell of burning perfectly well, but ...”
“But you drew no inference from it. I inferred that a slow-match was burning—but where? To search for it was running a risk, an incautious movement might precipitate the crisis. Instead, I said to myself, Monsieur Fandor—the natural thing for a traveller to do when he enters a bedroom is to sit down. Therefore it is more than probable, if a shot is to be fired, from a revolver say, or from a gun, that the weapon will be levelled at the height of a person’s head seated on a chair. I cut down my chair so as to be below the line of fire! I made you sit on the floor to save you from being hit!”
One thing, and one thing only, could Fandor find to say to express his admiration adequately: “Juve could not have done better!”
“Truly, it was not so bad. Now, if you would like to get to the bottom of things, we will take a look on top of that wardrobe ... There, what did I say?”
From the top of the wardrobe Tom Bob, mounted on a chair, proceeded to unship a sort of gatling-gun, consisting of six barrels fixed side by side, the muzzles of which, arranged fan-wise, commanded the whole room.