22 
LAND & WATER 
January 4, 1917 
(Continued from page 20) 
each letter cost him a measureless effort and as though the 
sum total of these letters were the only one that he had ever 
succeeded in composing and remembering. In this way, he 
wrote two wo/ds which Patrice read out : 
Arskn'e Lupin. 
" Ars:-ne Lupin," said Patrice, under his breatli. And, 
L)oking at Va-Hon in amazement. " Are you m your right 
mind ? What do you mean by Arsene Lupin ? Are you 
suggesting Arsne Lupin to me?" 
Ya-Bon nodded his liead. 
"' Arsene Lupin ? Do you know him ? " 
'■ Yes," Ya-Bon signified. 
Patrice then remembered that the Senegalese used to 
spend his davs at the hospital getting his good-natured com- 
rades to read all the adventures of Arsene Lupm aloud to 
him : and he grinned : . . 1 
" Yes, you know him as one knows somebody whose 
history one has read. 
" No," protested Ya-Bon. 
' Do you know him personally ? 
" Yes." 
" Get out, vou sillv fool ! Arsene Lupin is dead. He 
threw himself into the:' sea from a rock ; (i) and you pretend 
that you know him ? " 
" Yes." ' , • • , 
" Do you mean to say that you have met liim since ne 
<lied? "■ 
" Yes.' . , . - 
■• By Jove ! And Master Ya-Bon's influence with Arsene 
Lupin" is enough to make him come to life again and put him- 
self out at a sign from Master Ya-Bon ? " 
" Yes." 
" I say ! I had a high opinion of you as it was, but now 
there is nothing for me but to make you my bow. A friend 
of the late Arsene Lupin ! We're going it ! . . ■ And 
how long will it take vou to place hi.s ghost at our disposal ? 
Six months ? Three months ? One month ? A fortnight .'' 
Ye-Bon made a gesture. 
" About a fortnight." Captain Belval translated. " N ery 
weU, evoke your friend's spirit ; I shall be deliglited to make 
his acquaintance. Only, upon my word, you must have a 
very poor idea of me to imagine that I need a collaborator ! 
What next ! Do you take me for a helpless dunderhead ? 
CHAPTER IX 
Patrice and Coralie. 
E\'ERYTHIXG happened as M. Masseron had fore- 
told. The press did not speak. The public did not 
become excited. The various deaths were casually 
paragraphed. The funeral of Fssares Bey, the 
wealthy banker, passed unnoticed. 
But," on the day foil )wing the funeral, after Captian Belval, 
with the support of the police, had made an application to 
the militarv- authorities, a new order of things was established 
in the house in the Rue Raynouard. It was recognised as 
Home No. 2 attached to the hospital in the Champs-Elysees ; 
Mine. Essar^s was appointed matron ; and it became the resi- 
dence of Captain Belval and his seven wounded men ex- 
clusively. 
Coralie, therefore, was the only woman remaining. The 
cook and housemaid were sent away. The seven cripples did 
all the work of the house. One acted as hall-porter, another 
as cook, a third as butler. Ya-Bon, promoted to parlour- 
maid, made it his business to wait on Little Mother Coralie. 
At night he slei>t in the passage outside her door. By day 
lie mounted guard outside her window. 
•■ Let no one near that door or that window ! " Patrice said 
to him. " Let no one in ! You'll catch it if so much as a 
mosquito succeeds in entering h^r room." 
Nevertheless, Patrice was not easy in his mind. The enemy 
had gi\en him too many proofs of" reckless daring to let him 
imagine that he could take any steps to ensure her perfect 
protection. Danger always creeps in where it is least ex- 
pected ; and it was all the more difficult to ward off in that 
no one knew whence it threatened. Now that Essares Bey 
was dead, who was continuing his work ? Who had inherited 
the task of revenge ujion Coralie announced in his last letter '. 
M. Masseron had at ouce begun his work of investigation, 
out the dramatic side of the case seemed to leave him in- 
different. Since he had not found the body of the man 
whose dying cries reached Patrice Belval's ears, since he had 
discovered no clue to the mysterious as-ailant who had fired 
at Patrice and Coralie later in the day, since he was not able 
to trace where the assailant had obtained his ladder, he dropp;;d 
11 813. 
de Mittos. 
By Mauri c I-eblanc. Tian lated by Alexander Teixcira 
these questions and confined his efforts entirely to the search 
for the eighteen hundred bags of gold. These were all that 
concerned him. 
" We have every reason to believe that they are here, he 
said, " between tlie four sides of the cpiadrilaleral foimcd by 
the garden and tlie house. Obviously, a bag of gold weighmg 
a hundredweight docs not take up as much room by a Ion 
way a-i a sackol coal of the same wei,'ht. But. for all that 
eighteen hundred bags represent a cubic content that is not 
easily' concealed." 
In two days, he had assured himself that the trea-ure was 
hidden neither in the house nor under the house. On the 
evenings when Essares Bey's car brought the gold out of the 
coffers of the Franco-Oriental Bank to the Kuc;^ Raynouard, 
Essaris, the chaufleur and the man known as Gn'goire used 
to pass a thick wire through the grating of whicli the accomp- 
lices spoke. This wire was found. .Along the wire ran hooks, 
which were also found ; and on these the bags, were slung 
and afterwards stacked in a large cellar situated exactly 
under tlie library. 
It is needless to say that M. Masseron and his detectives 
devoted all their ingenuity and ;U1 the painstaking 
patience of which they were capable to the task of 
searching every corner of this eel ar. Their efforts only 
established beyond doubt that it contained no secret, save that 
of a staircase which ran down from the library and which was 
closed at the top by a trap-door concealed by the carpet. 
In addition to the grating on the Rue Raynouard. there was 
another which overlooked the garden, on the levol of the first 
terrace. These two ojjonings were barricaded on the inside 
by very heavy shutters, so that it was an easy matter to stacl; 
thousands and thousands of rouleaux of gold in the cellai 
before sending them away. 
" But how were they sent away ? " M. Masseron won 
dered. " That's the mystery. And why this intermediate 
stage in the basement, in the Rue Raynouard? Another 
mystery. And now we have Fakhi, Bournef and Co., declar- 
ing that, this time, it was not sent away, that the gold is here 
and that it can be found for the searching. We have searched 
the house. There is still the garden. Let us look there." 
It was a beautiful old garden and had once formed part of 
the wide-stretching estate where people were in the habit, at 
the end of the eighteenth century, of going to drink the 
Pa.ssy waters. With a two-hundrcd-yard frontage, it ran 
from" the Rue Raynouard to the (juay of the river-side and 
led, by four successive terraces, to an expanse of lawn as old 
as the rest of the garden, fringed with thickets of evergreens 
and shaded by group.s of tall trees. 
But the beauty of the garden lay chiefly in its four terrart-^ 
and in the view which they afforded of the river, the low 
ground on the left ban'c and the distant hills. They were 
united by twenty sets of steps ; and twent\- paths climbetl 
from the one to the other, paths cut between tlie buttressing 
walls and sometimes hidden in the floods of ivy that dashed 
from top to bottom. 
Here and there a statue stood out, a broken column, or 
the fragments of a capital. The stone balcony that edged 
the upper terrace was still adorned with all its old terra -cott:'. 
vases. On this terrace also were the ruins of two little round 
temples where, in the old days, the springs bubbled to th'.- 
surface. 
In front of the library windows was a circular basin. 
within the centre the figure of a child shooting a slender 
thread of water through the funnel of a shell. It was thu 
overflow from this basin, forming a little stream, that trickled 
over the rocks against which Patrice had stumbled on the 
first evening. 
" Ten acres to explore before we've done," said M. Mas eron 
to himself. - 
He employed upon this work, in addition to Belval's cripples 
a dozen of tiis own detectives. It was not a difficult business 
and was bound to lead to some definite result. As M. Masseron 
never ceased saying, eighteen hundred bags cannot remain 
invisible. An excavation leaves traces. You want a hole 
to go in and come out by. But neither the grass of the lawns 
nor the sand of the paths showed any signs of earth recently 
disturbed. The ivy ? The buttressing-walls ? The terraces ? 
Everything was inspected, but in vain. Here and there, in 
cutting up the ground, old conduit pipes were found, running 
towards the Seine, and remains of aque ucts that had once ser- 
ved to carry off the Passy waters. But there was no such 
thing as a cave, an underground chamber, a brick arch or 
anything that looked like a hiding place. 
Patrice and Coralie watched the progress of the search. 
And, yet, though they fully realized its importance and though 
on the other liand, they were still feeling the strain of the 
recent dramatic hours, in reality they were engrossed only in 
the inexplicable problem of their fate : and their conversation 
nearly always turned upon the mystery of the past. 
(To be continviei.) 
