20 
LAND & WATER 
April 12, I(;I7 
{Continued from page 18.) 
Bey, of course ! A dead body is discovered in the morniiv^. 
Who has committed the murder ? Suipicioii would at once 
have fallen on Simeon. ■ He would have been questioned and 
arrested. And Essares would have been found und^r 
Sim'on's mask. No, he needed liberty and facilities to move 
about as he pleased. To achieve this, h.^ kep. tiri' maJr 
concealed all the morning and arranged so tliat n ) oiie set 
foot in the library. He went three times and knocked at his 
wife's dooT, so that she sliould say that Essares Bey was 
still ahve during the morning. Then, when she went out, 
lie raised his voice and ordered Simeon, in oilier words him- 
self, to see her to the hospital in the Champs-Elysi'es. And 
iw this way Mme. Essares thought that she was leaving her 
husband behind her alive and that she was escorted by old 
Sim.'on, whereas actually she was leaving old Simt'on's 
corpse in an empty part of the house and was escorted by her 
husband. Tiien what happened .' What the rascal had 
planned. At one o'clock, the police, acting on the informa- 
tion laid by Colonel Fakhi. arrived and found themselves in 
I lie presence of a corpse. Whose corpse ? There was not a 
-'ladow of hesitation on that point. The maids recognised 
1 lieir master ; and, when Mme. Essares returned, it was her 
liusband whom she saw lying in front of the fireplace at 
which he had been tortured the night before. Old Sim'on, 
that is to say, Essares himself, helped to establish the identifi- 
cation. You yourself were taken in. The trick was played." 
" Yes," ssid Patrice, nodding his head, " that is how 
things must have gone. They all fit in." 
" The trick was played," Don Luis repeated, " and nobody 
could mp/ce out how it was done. Was there not this furtlicr 
proof, the letter written in Essares' own hand and found 
on his illesk ? The letter was dated at twelve o'clock on the 
fourth of April, addressed to his wife, and told her tiiat he 
was goin\; away. Better still, the trick was so successfully 
playe.'l tint the very clues which ought to have revealed the 
truth mervly conceak-d it. For instance, your father used 
to carry a tiny album of photographs in a pocket stitched 
mside his undervest. Essares did not notice it and did not 
remove the vest from the body. Well, when they found 
the album, they at once accepted that most unlikely 
h\p.)thesis : Essares Bey carrying on his person an album 
I'liled with photographs of his wife and Captain Belval. 
Ill the same way, when they found in the dead's man hand an 
amethyst pendant containing your two latest, photographs 
and when they also found a crumpled paper with something 
on it about ^ the Golden Triangle, they at once admitted that 
Essares Bey had stolen the pendant and the document and 
w.is holding them in his hand when he died ! So absolutely 
"crtain were they all that it was Essares Bey who had been 
murdered, that his dead body lay before their eyes and that 
they must not trouble about the question any longer. And 
m this way the new Simeon was master of the situation. 
Essares Bey is dead : Long live Simeon ! " 
Don Luis indulged in a hearty laugh. The adventure 
struck him as really amusing. 
" Then and there," he went on, " Essares, behind his 
impenetrable mask, set to work. That very day, he listened 
to your conversation with Coralie and, overcome with fury 
at seeing you bend over her, fired a shot from his revolver. 
i?ut, when this new attempt failed, he ran away and played 
.1 I elaborately comedy near the little door in the garden, crying 
.1 order, tossing the key over the wall to lay a false scent and 
i UUng to the ground half dead, as tliough he had been 
strangled by the eneiny who was sup > ised to have fired the 
shot. The comedy ended with a skilful assumption of mad- 
ness." 
" But what was the object of this madness ? " 
" What was the object ? Why, to nSake people leave him 
alone and keep them from questioning him or suspecting 
)i,:n. Once he was looked upon as mad, he could remain 
silent and unobserved. Otherwise, Mme. Essares would 
li ive recognised his voice at the first words he spoki;, however 
> leverly he might have altered his tone. From this time 
onward, he is mad. He is an irresponsible being. He goes 
about as he pleases. He is a madman I And his madness 
is so thoroughly admitted that he leads you, so to speak, 
by tlie hand to his former accomplices and causes you to 
have them arrested, without asking yourself for an instant 
if this madman is not acting with the clearest possible sense 
of his own interest. He's a madman, a poor, harmless 
:nadman, one of those unfortunates with whom nobody 
dreams of interfering. Henceforth, he has only his last two 
.adversaries to fight : Coralie and you. And this is an ea.sy 
matter for him. I presume that he got hold of a diary kept 
by your father. At any rate, he knows every day of the 
one which you keep. From this he learns the whole story, 
of the graves ; and he knows that, on the fourteenth of 
April, Coralie and jou are both going on a pilgrimage to those 
graves. B<.*sides, he plans to make you go there, for his 
plot is laid. He prepares against the son and the daughter, 
against the Patrice and Coralie of to-day. the attempt which 
he once prepared against the father and the mother. I iie 
attempt succeeeds at the start. It would have succeeded to 
the end, but for an idea that occurred to our poor Ya-Bon, 
thanks to which a new adversary, in the person of myself, 
entered the lists. . . . But I need hardly go on. You 
know the rest as well as I do ; and, like myself, you can 
judge in all his glory t;he inhuman villain who, in the space 
of those twenty-four hours, allowed his accomplice Gregoire 
to be strangled, buried your Coralie under the sand-heap, 
killed Ya-Bon, locked me in the lodge, or thought he did, 
buried you alive in the grave dug by your father and made 
away with Vacherot, the porter. .\nd, now. Captain Belval, 
do you think that I ought to have prevented him from com- 
mitting suicide, this pn-tty gentlt-miii who, in the last resort, 
was trying to pass himself off as your father ? 
" You were right," said Patrice. " You have been tight 
all through, from start to finish. 1 see it all now, as a \vluii<; 
and in every detail. Only one point remains: thecioldeu 
Triangle. How did you find out the truth ' What was it that 
brought you to this sand-heap and enabled you to save 
Corjflie from the most awful do.ith ? " 
" Oh, that part was even simpler," replied Don l.ii^. 
" and the light came almost without my knowing it : 1 U 
teU you in a few words. But let us move away first. .M. 
Masseron and his men are beconv.ng a little troublesome." 
The detectives were distributed at the two entrances to 
Berthou's Wharf. M. Masseron was giving them his in- 
structions. He was obviously speaking to the;n of Don 
Luis and preparing to accost him. 
" Let's get on the barge," said Don Luis. " I'vi' lelt bnuie 
important pipers there." 
Patrice followed him. Opposite the cabin containing 
Grcgoire's body was another cabin, reached by the. same 
comp.inion-way. It was furnished with a table and a chair. 
" Here, caplain," said Don Luis, taking a letter from the 
drawer of the table and settling it, " is a letter which I will 
ask you to . . . but don't let us waste words. I shall 
hardly have time to satisfy your curiosity. Our friends 
are coming nearer. Well, we were saying, the Gold'-n 
Triangle. ..." 
He hst'^u -J to what, was happening outside with an atten- 
tion whose real meaning Patrice was soon to understand. 
.\nd. continuing to give ear, he resumed ; 
" The Golden Triangle ? There are problems wliich we 
solve more or less by accident, without trying. We are 
guided to a right solution by external events, among which 
we choose unconsciously, feeling our way in the dark, ex- 
amining this one, thrusting aside that one and suddenly be- 
holding the object aimed at . . . Well, that morning, ' 
after taking you to the tombs and burying you under the stone, 
Essares Bey came back to me. Believing me to be locked 
into the studio, he had the pretty thought to turn on the gas 
meter and then went off to the quay above Berthou's Wharf. 
Here he hestitated : and his hesitation provided mo with a 
precious clue. He was certainly then thinking of releasing 
Coralie. People passed and he went away. Knowing where 
he was going, I returned to your assistance, told your friends 
at Essares' house and asked them to look after you. Then 
I came back here. Indeed, the whole course of events 
obhged me to come back. It was unhkely that the bags of 
gold were inside the conduit ; and. as the Belle Helene had 
not taken them off, they must be beyond the garden, outside 
the conduit and therefore somewhere near here. I ex- 
plored the barge we are now on, not so much with the object 
of looking for the ba?s as with the hope of finding some un- 
expected piece of information and also, I confess, the four 
millions in Gregoire's possession. Will, when I started cx- 
])loring a place where I fail to find what I want, I always 
remember that capital story of Edgar Allen Poe's, The 
Purloined Letter. Do yf)u rec<jllect 'i The stolen diplomatic 
document which was known to be hidden in a certain room. 
The pohce investigate every nook and corner of the room 
and take up all the boards of the floor, without results. But 
Dupin arrives and almost immediately goes, to a card-rack 
dangling from a httle brass knob on the wall and containing 
a solitary soiled and crumpled letter. This is the document 
of which he was in search. \Vell, I instinctively adopted the 
same jirocess. I looked where no one would (tnam of look- 
ing, 'in places which do not constitute a hiding-place because 
it would really be too easy to discover. This gave me the 
idea of turning the pages of four old directories standing in a 
row on that shelf. The four milhons were there. And I 
knew all that I wanted to know." 
" About what ? " 
" About Essares' temperament, his habits, the extent of 
his attainments, his notion of a good hiding place. We had 
plunged on the expectation of a meeting with dithculties ; 
{('unlinued on page 22.) 
