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risk my men's skin as well as my own. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if the affair fails through any fault of yours, that my first ball will be for you."

As long as they kept the road to Meriville, the track that led to the great forest, the hussars and gendarmes were able to ride two and two, in spite of the dim starlight; but Vasseur allowed no "éclaireurs," for fear of giving a premature alarm. As to his own troop being surprised he felt no fear. Arrived at the thicker part of the forest, each horseman dismounted, and with left hand on his pistol, and musketoon slung on his back, led his horse through the underwood the best v y he could. After about a hundred yarus the path began to grow rocky, and to ascend, with trees and thickets here and there, and precipices opening on either side. Vasseur went first, holding Le Borgne de Jouy with an iron grip under the left arm. After a quarter of an hour of this dangerous climb, Le Borgne de Jouy pointed out a path, and said, in a

low voice:

"Regardez ! there is the Devil's Leap." The road that showed by the pale starlight was narrow, steep, and suspended between two yawning precipices. The stumble of a horse, a cry of pain, a whistle of treason, and all would perish. Two or three determined men well posted there could have kept all the hosts of Charlemagne at bay. Vasseur, at a glance, comprehended the situation. He returned to the brigadier of hussars, who followed his steps, and said:

"One by one every man and every horse follow where I tread. If the chaffeurs attack let every man make his horse lie down, and throw himself on the ground." The road luckily soon became sandy; the horses' hoofs could not be heard. In ten minutes Le Saut du Diable was passed, and not a horse had slipped. The path now widened into a narrow plateau, commanding a gorge that seemed fathomless. A hundred feet below, a little to the left, Le Borgne de Jouy pointed to a faint red glare. It was the chauffeurs' camp, and Vasseur could have thrown a stone down into the bivouac fire. By the dim light Vasseur's eyes sparkled to see a great number of men stretched out with their feet towards the fire.

"Eh bien," said Le Borgne de Jouy, "have I kept my word ?"

That moment Vasseur's hand closed upon the spy's mouth, while at a prearranged signal two men garotted and

bound the thief, and threw him like a log at the foot of a tree.

"A mere measure of precaution, mon garçon," whispered Vasseur; "it is for your interest. If this coup does not turn out well, your comrades will never suspect the man they find here tied round like a sausage.'

Two winding paths led down to the abyss. At the opposite side of the gorge were thick trees, and not the shadow even of a rabbit run.

"A regular mouse-trap," whispered Vasseur to the brigadier. "The fools have forgotten to guard the heights, but for that they could have carbonadoed us. Take half the men and wheel to the right. I'll move on the left, and then fall together on these rascals. No fire-arms. The sabre only. Leave up here six steady men, with muskets ready for the fugitives."

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He then sent on his hussars; when he judged they had reached the required point, he dashed on at a gallop, followed by his gendarmes. In a moment they were on them. Le Beau François, recognisable at once by his great height, was first on his feet, pistol in either hand. ready finger was on the triggers, when he heard the gallop of the hussars. Seeing at once that they were surrounded, he threw away his arms, crying, "I surrender." Le Gros Normand had already covered a gendarme, when Le Beau François cried, "Pa de betises!" and kicked him and the musket into the fire. In a moment the gendarmes and hussars had their hands on the rascals' throats and cords round their hands. The whole covey was caught at the one drag of the net. Day by day strings of sham beggars, sham pedlars, deserters, and jugglers were hurried to the prisons of Chartres. A celebrated receiver named Mongendre and his son were captured in a hut in the very heart of the forest of Orléans by six determined gendarmes, who had disguised themselves as wood-cutters.

Bit by bit, crime after crime of these assassins, who had for so many years devastated central France, came to the light. It was discovered that the chauffeurs formed a secret brotherhood, and that any disclosure of their plans was usually followed by the murder of the informer. On one occasion a boy-thief, Le Petit Garçon d'Etrechy, had been beaten to death for imprudently talking of a robbery. Beau François sentenced him to death, and as he was dying, Sans Pouce trampled on his head with his huge iron-shod sabots.

Le

The body was not even buried. In 1791, Charles de Paris, Vincent le Tonnelier, and Beauceron le Blouse, bludgeoned to death a comrade for having helped an innkeeper against the gang. Franche Montagne, about the same time, was burnt to death for some petty reason, and his ears cut off and nailed to an adjoining tree, as a warning to his brothers. La Belle Nanette had a narrow escape, and La Dubarry, another lady of the gang, was nearly beaten to death for threatening, in a moment of passion, to denounce the savage Sans Pouce as a deserter. It was also found that Beau François, Sans Pouce, Beor, Marabon, and Charles de Paris, had been aided by two servants in a robbery at Levès, in May, 1795, when the farmer and his wife were strangled and robbed. Twenty-seven days Vasseur scoured the dangerous country, without taking off his clothes or laying down his sword. Every day he effected some fresh captures. In the three prisons of Chartres there were crowded nearly seven hundred chauffeurs, till dysentery broke out and thinned the black ranks. While awaiting his trial, Le Beau François escaped from the infirmary, into which he had got by shamming a fever. A sick man escaped with him, but was recaptured the next day, half dead, under a tree. A quarter of an hour after his escape, Le Beau François robbed a poor gardener of Chartres of three crowns twenty sous, and some bread.

Nearly two years after their first arrest the chauffeurs were solemnly tried at Chartres, one hundred and ninety-four witnesses being examined, the chauffeurs loudly protesting against any mere ignorant labourers being retained on the jury, and demanding lawyers and educated

men.

Twenty of the men, and three of the miserable women, were condemned to death. When the sentence was pronounced, the chauffeurs seeing a movement among the gendarmes, imagined they were to be instantly shot where they sat, and leaping up in frenzy they tried to break through the bayonets, but were soon overpowered. Le Borgne de Mans, Rouge d'Auneau, Chat Gauthier, Sans Pouce, and Le Gros Normand were among these dregs. The spy of Vasseur, Germain Bouscaut, alias Le Borgne de Jouy, was condemned to twenty-four years in irons. Hosts of others were sentenced to various terms in the galleys, where they spent the rest of their miserable lives. The old man, Père

Elouis, the reviver of chauffage, Le Gros Beauceron, one of the assassins at Millouard, the sanguinary Quatre Sous, and Léjeune, the brigands' curé, had already perished either by fever or the guillotine. The twenty-three condemned members of the Orgères band perished with brutal courage on a scaffold in the market-place of Chartres.

The stragglers of the Orgères band joined the Vendéans, or escaped to the Lyonnais, Ardeches, or the Cevennes. Three were shot in attacking a diligence filled with disguised gendarmes, and four more condemned to death at Bourg. On the day of the execution tse four ruffians, in some way or other getting rid of their irons, and obtaining cutlasses, defied the gendarmes. Two of the wretches were shot dead, and two who were wounded were led bleeding to death, and shouted blasphemies and ça ira till the axe fell.

On the return of Napoleon from Egypt in October, 1799, Fouché, who was then head of the police, crushed the last cubs of the wolf's brood. In forty-seven departments three hundred brigands were arrested, and a great number destroyed. In the Deux Sevres ten armed brigands were guillotined. The leader of these was Le Grand Gars. The most ferocious of his acolytes was one Girodet. This Girodet, whom we leave under a wayside tree with his skull cloven and his brutal face looking ferocious even in death, was our old friend of Orgères, the chauffeur captain, Le Beau François.

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CHAPTER XI. QUO FATA DUCUNT.

THE first bell had rung, and the huge locomotive, just filled, was leisurely backing from the water-tank towards the train to which it was to be coupled, as Philip Vane entered the Springside station. He found his knees trembling under him as he alighted from the fly which had picked him up on the Wheatcroft road, and felt that he should require all the nerve at his command to face the blaze of light and the bustling crowd spread over the platform. He had his return-ticket in his pocket, so that there was no occasion for him to enter the booking-office; but on his arrival he had left his travelling-coat and rugs in the

cloak-room, and he deliberated for an instant whether it would not be better to leave them there, rather than undergo the scrutiny of the porter. Suddenly, howover, it flashed upon him that he could not recal the contents of his coat-pockets, and that there might be therein some card or memorandum, some envelope of a letter, which might lead to its recognition as his property, and be brought in as testimony of the fact that he had been in Springside on that fearful night. He must fetch them at all risks; and his brandy-flask, which he had emptied in the fly, must be refilled at the refreshment-stand.

The cloak-room, he was glad to find, was at the other end of the platform, away from the bustle and the glare. He went there, and found it occupied by two men : one a clerk, seated at a high desk at the far end, entering in a huge ledger the names of the articles which the other man, a porter, called out as he sorted them away. The clerk was working under a shaded lamp, and in comparative darkness; but two flaming gas-jets lighted the other portion of the room, one of them immediately above the large, square, open window at which Philip Vane stood, and handed in his ticket.

"Coat and rug, sir?" said the man, in his broad Somersetshire accent. "There you are, sir." And he placed the articles on the broad ledge before him. "Beg your pardon, sir," he added, pointing down to Philip's hand, outstretched to take them, "cut your knuckles, I think, sir ?"

Philip glanced down at his hand, and saw that the back was stained and rough with blood; he was fully alive to the danger of showing the smallest sign of trepidation at that moment, so holding his hand towards the gaslight, he examined it coolly, and said, in as careless a tone as he could assume, "So I have; I could not get down the fly window just now, so broke it with my fist; but I had no idea my hand was

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pulling his travelling-cap over his eyes, tried to compose himself to sleep.

Throughout that journey, however, there was no sleep for Philip Vane. The whirling of the wheels beat into his brain, the scream of the engine sent his heart leaping in his breast, the light from the small stations flashing through the windows as the train dashed by them, startled him so, that he clutched the elbows of the seat convulsively, and leaned eagerly forward, in his endeavour to trace any sign of the diminution of their speed. No, onward and still onward they went. He remembered having ascertained that they only halted once-at Swindon-on the entire journey; but what if the discovery had been made? What if Madge had denounced him as the assailant? Would not the news be flashed along the line, and the train be stopped at some intermediate station in order that he might be arrested? Arrested! Let him fancy himself in that position, and think calmly through the case in all its bearings, in order to decide what course he should pursue.

When the old man recovered from his fit he would be able to describe the details of the assault made upon him, and to declare by whom and for what reason he had been attacked. Then would come out the story of the forgery, and then Philip Vane trembled from head to foot, as he thought of the punishment which the discovery of his commission of that crime would inevitably bring upon him. Before his mental vision at that moment rose the figure of his wife, and he ground his heel upon the carriage floor and cursed aloud. It was to her he owed all his ill-luck in life.. If he had not married her he would have been free to marry Mrs. Bendixen, and Delabole would have had no power to compel him to commit the forgery; if he had not married her there would have been no reason for him to undertake that journey to Springside, and he would not have been brought into collision with that old man, whom he had been compelled in self-defence to strike. He had struck the old man, and the blood was still upon his hand. He moistened his handkerchief, and as he endeavoured to rub off the dull red mark, there rose, even in his hardened heart, a feeling of shame at having struck one so old and evidently so ill. "I could not help it," he muttered between his teeth, "he held me like a vice. A man with all that strength left in him won't take long in recovering. It was a mercy that he fainted,

all," replied the man. "Egg-shells and cards seem about the materials which commercial houses are made of now-a-days, let alone companies limited, which are a pleasant combination of cobwebs and feathers. Two more suspensions announced this morning in the papers, sir. Consols fell three-quarters, and a general feeling of uneasiness prevalent. That'll touch us at Manchester, that will. Know anything of Manchester, sir ?"

and so set me free. Call in the aid of the police; a forger and a scoundrel, eh? That meant Irving's business, plainly. But how did he learn that? Asprey's orders, as to the old man's letters and telegrams being kept back, must have been disobeyed. Who could have done that? My charming wife again, I firmly believe. What could she be doing in that house? I noticed she had no bonnet on, and seemed quite at home. If she had anything to do with it, this infernal ill-luck Philip Vane answered shortly that he would be fully accounted for. One week knew nothing of Manchester, and the more would have done it: would have seen commercial gentleman, thus snubbed, beme married and rich, and well out of the took himself once more to his newspaper, reach of the police with whom the old man and when he had sucked it completely dry threatened me, and whom he will certainly of all commercial information, he drew set on my track so soon as he recovers. forth a fat black-leather pocket-book, by What's this? slackening speed now, without making entries in which, and reading over a doubt!" And he rose to his feet and peered the entries already made, he beguiled the anxiously out of the window, as the train time until the end of the journey. Meanran from the outer darkness in amongst while, Philip Vane had again settled himblocks of stationary carriages, past solitary self into his corner, and was deep in conengines with the outlines of the stokers templation. The recurrence of the panic standing black and weird against the glow-in the City, of which he had just heard, ing fires, and finally came to a standstill alongside the platform at Swindon.

Philip Vane started as the door was unlocked and thrown open, but the porter only made the customary announcement of the ten minutes' wait, and passed on. Vane looked round, observing but few passengers, who, for the most part, were hurrying to the refreshment-room. He followed them, drank two small glasses of brandy at the counter, and had his flask filled again. Then he returned to the carriage. As he was entering he felt himself touched on the shoulder, and, turning round, found at his elbow a guard, who demanded his ticket. They would not stop until they reached Paddington, the guard said, and the gentleman would not be disturbed again.

Another passenger was seated in the compartment, a middle-aged man, with a seal-skin cap and a fur rug. He had already hooked a reading-lamp into the lining of the carriage behind him, and was deep in the folds of an evening paper. So intent was he in his occupation, that he merely looked up for an instant as Philip entered, but shortly after the train had started he dropped the paper on to his knees and emitted a long whistle.

"Do you take any interest in the City, sir ?" he asked, looking across at his companion.

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was another item against him. He had a vague idea of borrowing money from Delabole on the strength of his approaching marriage, and escaping with it to Spain or some other place little infested by Britons, where he could lie perdu until he had a chance of making his way to South America. There might be some difficulty in this now, for in this panic Delabole might be hard hit, even though he saw from the newspaper, which he picked up and glanced through, that Terra del Fuegos remained at the price at which he had left them.

She could not

As they sped on, innumerable projects arose in Philip Vane's mind, were thought over, put aside for further cogitation, or summarily dismissed: prominent among all the others came the idea that even when he was denounced as a forger, and when the fact of his former marriage was blazed abroad-two things certain to happen within the next few days, perhaps within the next few hours -even then Mrs. Bendixen might not desert him. be his wife, it is true, but she loved him passionately, with a warmth and devotion unknown to paler, colder natures, with a hungry fervour which might prompt her to forgive the deception he had practised on her, and to fly with him to some place where they could live together beyond the reach of any of their former acquaintances. Or-for the brandy which Philip Vane had swallowed had but had the effect of clear

ing his brain and steadying his nerve, and he calculated his chances with as much coolness and judgment as though another's fate and not his own were trembling in the balance-or supposing that Mrs. Bendixen in the contest between her position and her nature were to give way to the former, she would still have her money, money over which certain letters addressed by her to him, and carefully retained, would give him considerable control.

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Yes, that was how it must be managed; game of respectability was played out, the news of the forgery and of his intended bigamy would be promulgated at once, and there was nothing left for him but flight. He would have time enough after his arrival in town to get together his most valuable articles of property, and to start by an early train or boat to such destination as he might fix upon without his flying visit to London being heard of, and while his servants and people at the office would imagine that he was still absent on a business tour, on which he was known to have started. He would not see Delabole, he would not see any one; the cause of his flight would soon be perfectly apparent, and his enemies might then do their worst. He had sufficient money to take him to a place of safety, and then he would work the oracle with Mrs. Bendixen. Properly managed, his fate would not be such a hard one after all. But what a difference one week, even a few days, might have made! Had Asprey's calculations been fulfilled; had Sir Geoffry died at the time the doctor predicted, the forgery would not have been discovered; Madge could have been brought to terms; and as Mrs. Bendixen's husband, he, Philip Vane, would have had wealth and position, which were to him the only two things worth living for! As that bitterest thought of all "what might have been" crossed Philip Vane's mind, he stamped his foot with rage, thereby awaking the commercial gentleman, who, struggling into a sitting posture, and wiping the steam from the carriage window, muttered, "London at last!" and proceeded to pick up his newspaper and get his travelling-rugs together.

London! Now Philip Vane must have his wits about him, and be ready to carry into execution all that he has determined

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membered. It is comparatively early, not yet eleven o'clock, and being a bright night the streets are filled with people returning from the more sober entertainments, or the votaries of Saint Monday, who have been keeping their accustomed holiday. When these latter gather together in little chattering knots, as they do at almost every street corner where there is a public-house, Philip Vane looks out of the cab window at them, wondering what they are talking about; whether perchance the news of the assault had already reached town, and whether he might be the subject of their conversation. Some of the small shops, at once news-venders and tobacconists, which are still open, have the placard-bill of the contents of the evening papers exhibited at their doors, and Philip scans these eagerly, but finds in them no cause for fear. As he nears his home in the more aristocratic part of the town, he leaves all the noise and bustle behind him, and when the cab stopped as directed at the corner of the street, there was no one within sight. Philip alighted, and taking his rugs in his hand hurried to the Albany. He thought it would be useless to attempt to shirk the inspection of the gate-porter, but to his delight that functionary had temporarily yielded up his post to a deputy, who, unexcited by the novelty of his position, had dropped off to sleep, so that Philip passed by him and gained his chambers unobserved. As he opened the door with his latch-key, he recollected that he had given his servant a holiday, and he knew that he was not likely to come across any one else, for the men holding chambers in the same block were all out of town, and their housekeepers were only visible in the early morning.

Now then to work. In the outer hall were two or three trunks piled on each other. He selected the largest of these, and dragged it into the middle of the sitting-room; then he paused, undecided as to how he should commence his work of selection. The rooms had been furnished by a fashionable upholsterer, who had been told to spare no expense, and, as is usual with such people, had rendered them very handsome and eminently uninhabitable : wood of the finest grain, velvet of the softest texture, gilding of the brightest sheen, were there in abundance, but could not be taken away. They had cost much money and must be left behind. At one time, he had a notion of dismantling the shelves of the clocks, and the china orna

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