Max Pemberton

“ The rats fled at its light; stones fell with resounding splashes while they ran; cold air oozed up and seemed to freeze the robber's face.
“Mon Dieu!” said he, “you have discovered something, monsieur; there is a little tunnel running into the well, and the water does not cover its mouth.”
“You have said well,” answered the unknown; “through that tunnel we shall pass to our friends. After you, Monsieur Cabot. The rope which holds the bucket will bear the weight of three men. Trust your life to it rather than to your friends without. I wait for you.”
Coq le Roi shuddered. ”

“ Oh, they cheated you well—but read that letter, and it will save you being fooled a third time.”
“A third time!” exclaimed the lieutenant, looking round quickly, while the clasp of the girl's pretty fingers was strong upon his left hand, into which she was forcing the letter.
“As I say—a third time,” she explained boisterously. “Corinne has cheated you once in making you believe that a woman is a man; I have cheated you a second time in making you believe that a man is a woman.” ”

“ Meanwhile, the whole quarter without was thundering with the clamour of the mob—hell itself seemed to have been loosed in that labyrinth of crime and squalor.
Coq le Roi was sure that his liberty was a matter of moments.
“Look you, my friend,” he continued to the unknown, who had watched him with some amusement and perhaps a little malice, “I am now going upstairs to get some fresh air upon the roof. But I shall not forget that you, whoever you may be, warned me of to-night's affair. I wish you good-night, monsieur. ”

“ Monsieur de Sartines had supped well, as he always did at the Hôtel Beutreillis. Though he declared that the gloomy old house in the Rue St. Paul was more forbidding than the Bastille where its exterior was concerned, there was no one readier to admit that Mademoiselle Corinne de Montesson, its mistress, was the cleverest woman in Paris and the most fascinating. ”

“ To his surprise, a mocking laugh answered his spoken thoughts. He turned round swiftly, abashed at his words, to find that the intruder was no other than an exceedingly pretty girl, apparently not yet twenty years of age, who was then sitting upon a mouldy stone bench under the shadow of the elms. She was dressed in an exquisite riding habit of green velvet, and the merriment of her laugh, together with the brightness of her eyes and the exceeding suppleness of her figure, completed a picture which arrested even the wandering attention of the Lieutenant of Police. ”

“ Coq le Roi permitted the bitter wind to blow upon his face for some minutes, then he drew back his head, for he remembered his intention to drink a cup of wine at the nearest cabaret, and he found the idea a very good one.
”Bah!” said he to himself, as he tugged at his long boots and looked to his pistols, which lay, ready for priming, upon the table by his ragged bed, a what have I to do with woman's tattle here? Guards in the Rue St. Sauveur! what a day that would be! ”

“ Then he unwound a long coil of thin rope, and attaching the lantern to this, he lowered it into the orifice. Coq le Roi, looking over his shoulder timidly, watched him as one watches a conjuror at his tricks.
“Monsieur,” cried he, “you cannot hide me in the well.”
The unknown laughed scornfully.
“St. Denis,” exclaimed he, “that a man should live five years in a house and yet know nothing of its resources! Do you follow the path of that light, my friend? Well, tell me what you see.”
“The light shows me walls green with slime and fungus,” said the robber. ”

“ The king knows that the man is here?”
“Certainly—or rather, he knows that I await him.”
Sartines asked himself for the fifth time what wine he had drunk and from what malady he suffered. Then he stumbled up the narrow stairs; and, while Corinne held aloft the lantern which a servant had given to her, he entered a small and exquisitely furnished room—and there he saw Coq le Roi.
The highwayman was no typical robber. ”

“ And she has won, you know!”
“What!” roared Sartines.
“It is as I say. The man you thought you saw in her house last night was not a man at all. It was Mademoiselle Guérin, from the Opéra Comique.”
“Thousand devils,” exclaimed the lieutenant, rising from his seat, “I never thought of that!”
“Of course you did not. You forgot that your robber has the face of a young girl. Corinne, you know, remembered that, and so she tricked you. She has always been the friend of Coq le Roi. She warned him two days ago that spies were in the Rue St. Sauveur, and lent him the disguise in which he escaped. ”

“ You have no love for history, you say. Saint Denis, I do not wonder at it, since it is for you that Monsieur de Sartines has brought about this pretty play and come into this den of beasts.”
Coq le Roi, quickened by the danger, began to prime his second pistol. His natural courage had returned to him now. Little man that he was, little and with a face like a young girl's, he had made danger so good a bedfellow that surprise was rather pleasant than alarming to him. ”

“ Saint Paul! what throats they have!”
No man cares to be deceived with the tricks of sleep; nor was Coq le Roi,—otherwise the Little Red Man, otherwise Jacques Cabot, the notorious scourge of the highways about Paris, and one of the most successful robbers that ever set spurs to a horse,—an exception to the rule. ”

“ His voice was the voice of a man who speaks his thoughts aloud, unconscious that any listen.
“It is six o'clock,” he said, after a long pause, “and the rain falls heavily upon the road to Fontenay. I see a great hill, and at its foot the woods stretch out to meet the waters. One horseman keeps watch in the dark place of the valley. ”