“You got the jewels!” I gasped.
“Certainly. What do you think we are here for—on our way to Amsterdam—if not on business?” he answered, with a smile.
“But where are they? I haven’t seen them when our luggage has been overhauled at the frontiers,” I said.
“Stop the car, and get down.”
I did so. He went along the road till he found a long piece of stick. Then, unscrewing the cap of the petrol-tank, he stuck in the stick and moved it about.
“Feel anything?” he asked, giving me the stick.
I felt, and surely enough in the bottom of the tank was a quantity of small loose stones! I could hear them rattle as I stirred them up.
“The settings were no use, and would tell tales, so I flung them away,” he explained; “and I put the stones in there while you were in Nice, the night before we left. Come, let’s get on again;” and he re-screwed the cap over one of the finest hauls of jewels ever made in modern criminal history.
“Well—I’m hanged!” I cried, utterly dumbfounded. “But what of Mademoiselle’s father?”
Bindo merely raised his shoulders and laughed. “Mademoiselle may be left to tell him the truth—if she thinks it desirable,” he said. “Martin has already cleared out—to Buenos Ayres, minus everything; Regnier is completely sold, for no doubt the too confiding Martin would have got nothing out of ‘The President’; while Mademoiselle and Madame are now wondering how best to return to Paris and face the music. Old Dumont will probably have to close his doors in the Rue de la Paix, for we have here a selection of his very best. But, after all, Mademoiselle—whose plan to go to London in search of her father was a rather ingenious one—certainly has me to thank that she is not under arrest for criminal conspiracy with her long-nosed lover!”