Would the conspirators stick to the arrangement made at the “Chat Mort,” or would they, alarmed by the raid on the house, make an eleventh-hour change in their plans? That was the problem to be solved.
Monsieur le Préfet was living on the edge of a volcano, and all his precautions would, he feared, be of no avail against them.
Dick felt convinced they would carry out the plan arranged. It could not be imagined, he argued, that they would dream they had been overheard, and it was evident that the plan had been very carefully considered. Ultimately it was decided to relax none of the ordinary precautions, but to keep a specially close watch on the old villa in the Place d’Italie. Dick decided that, whatever the police did, he would make his own arrangements for that purpose. The sequel proved that it was well he did so.
On the night prior to the procession the police carried out a very drastic coup. Every known anarchist in Paris was arrested on some pretext or another and locked up. One by one they were briefly interrogated, while Jules and Yvette, concealed in the room behind a screen, tried to recognise any of the voices they had heard in the Chat Mort.
Fifty or sixty prisoners had been interviewed before Jules and his sister standing behind a screen heard a voice they recognised. It was that of the man who had suggested the old villa in the Place d’Italie as a suitable base for the attempt on the Préfet. None of the others could be identified, and it was evident that the worst of the miscreants were still at large.
The man whom they recognised proved to be Anton Kapok, a Hungarian of whom nothing was known except that he was in the habit of delivering violent harangues at Socialist and Anarchist meetings. But it was evident now that he was far more dangerous than the police had hitherto supposed.
Closely interrogated, he denied everything. He knew nothing, he declared, of the “Chat Mort” and had not been mixed up in any conspiracy. His Anarchist proclivities, however, he boldly admitted and declared that the police knew all there was to know about him.
To the police a search of Kapok’s room in Bellville revealed nothing more incriminating than a mass of Anarchist literature. But Dick made a discovery which they had overlooked.
Close to the ceiling, immediately above the fireplace, was suspended on two hooks what looked like a rod from which pictures might be hung. The police had, in fact, so regarded it. Dick never knew what aroused his suspicions, but something impelled him to mount a ladder and fetch the rod down. Then he made a startling discovery.
The supposed rod was nothing less than one of the wonderful blow-pipes used by some of the aboriginal tribes of South America and elsewhere to shoot their poisoned darts with which they either fought their enemies or killed dangerous animals. One of the darts, a tiny affair fashioned out of a sharp thorn with a tuft of cotton which just filled the tube, was actually in position.