Max Pemberton

“ And that was the truth, though old Jonathan Grey, after he'd heard what the police had to say, paid over every shilling of the money he'd promised, and gave me a hundred more for myself. But he was out of Paris while my master lay unconscious, and though Dora Grey cried enough for three, her studies in painting closed on the spot.
The Maison d'Or is pulled down now. I've no doubt myself that many a good man walked down those steps to his death. A more cunning trap you couldn't find. ”

“ Jonathan Grey, the father of the missing man, had walked into the trap we had set for him like a child into a sweetstuff-shop. His answer to his daughter's cable was immediate. "Offer the reward," he said, and we had offered it. That is to say, we had printed a thousand bills and had burned them.
"Once get those bills about Paris," said I to Sir Nicolas, "and your man's here in a couple of hours. That don't suit us when ten thousand dollars are at stake—not by a long way. If Michel Grey is to be found at all, I'm going to find him, and to bank half the reward in my name. ”

“ Though the door of the room from which they had come had only been open for a moment, I had seen a sight strange enough to have upset a stronger man than me. In a great Eastern-like room, all lit up with queer-colored lanterns, and having a fountain of water splashing in the middle of it, some twenty men were lying on little beds. ”

“ Such shops are cheap this way. They trap a man with cash, aud make it pleasant for him so long as his money lasts, then they knock him on the head or leave him to skip the golden gutter. You couldn't have named a worse job. I doubt that you'll ever set eyes on Grey again, if you live to be a hundred."
This was a facer! I'd thought all along that the American was laid by the heels in some opium-shop, but that we should have any difficulty in getting him out was a fact that never entered my head.
"Then you don't take the thing on, Jim?" ”

“ AT THE MAISON D'OR A week after this talk I left the Hôtel de Lille and took a lodging in a little house in the Rue Dupin. It was the first time in my life that ever I'd set to work to hunt a man, and I knew at the beginning of it that I had a stiff job before me. ”

“ Run into the beer-shop there, and bring all the men you can find to these leads. Promise them twenty francs apiece to shout when I call to them. They'll do it quick enough if you say the police are with us on the other side."
"But you, yourself?"
"I'm going to throw these steps across the gap there, and force that window. After that, I'm trusting to bluff."
"You take your life in your hands," said he.
"Don't you trouble about that. You get the men. Quick's the word for this job." ”

“ Why, it appeared that after they had got Grey in the house—which was one of the largest and one of the lowest dens in Paris—they'd kept him drunk with the drug, in the hope that he'd add more money to what they'd robbed him of. On the day Jim and I set out for the cabaret, Grey had sent a messenger down to the Hôtel de Lille to get some of his traps and things. Sir Nicolas came across this messenger, and bribed the whole tale out of him. After that, he didn't want to lose a minute tracing the man, and he went straight off to Montmartre, leaving word at the police-station of what he'd done. ”

“ I have made it plain, I think, that the cabaret or beer-shop, or whatever you like to call it, stood back to back with the house we'd come to enquire about. There was only a yard and a high wall between them; but at the end of this yard, and jammed up against the wall, was a shed for lumber, so built that when you set the steps on its roof you could put your fingers on the top of the bricks above and haul yourself up. It didn't take Jim and I a minute to do this ”

“ I've no fancy for that myself."
"Jim," says I, "you haven't got the heart of a rabbit. What nonsense you're talking! Take me up to the shop, and let me have a look at it."
"I was going to suggest that," says he. "It 'll be dark in an hour, and no one to tread on our heels. I know the woman who keeps the cabaret at the back of the place. ”