Ha! on the centre table a piece of paper quite large. No writing on it, but instead a mocking sign, two crossed daggers roughly drawn in red and the mystic number:
Blood, human blood! Blood still fresh and scarcely dried. They had been here, the traitors; they had not left long, for blood does not take long to dry, and they had determined to flout their dupe with this ghastly mummery. To Paris! to Paris! They could still be caught before the October dawn was reddening the roofs of the Conciergerie and the battlements of the Bastille.
André wheeled with a hoarse command, and then something, what he could not say, a swift intuition or feeling, arrested him as he left the room. He hurled the screen aside. Ah! Ah! A cry of horror broke from him.
A man was lying behind it, face downwards, his blood staining the mouse-gnawed boards. The man was the Chevalier de St. Amant.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE CARREFOUR DE ST. ANTOINE NO. 3
André saw in a moment from the Chevalier’s position as he lay face downwards on the bare boards what had happened. The unhappy boy had been stabbed from behind; and he bore plain signs of having been searched after he had been stabbed, for his clothes were rumpled, his boots wrenched off, his stockings ripped up, his shirt torn open. The searcher had then calmly left him to bleed to death. Had the Chevalier been the robber of the escritoire? If so had the secret despatch been taken from him and the second thief escaped with it? Who could say?
André kneeled down and gently lifted the prostrate body on to the sofa.
“Go, two of you, at once to Versailles,” he cried to his men, “and bring a doctor. Ride for your lives.”
He returned to the couch, but as he did so his boot kicked against something that jingled. An English guinea! George Onslow had been here, then. André recognised with the intuition that is stronger than proof that Onslow was the second thief, as well as the man who had stabbed the Chevalier in the back.