The peasant did not appear to be greatly excited by this generous offer and did not even whip up the wretched animal which ambled along between shafts that were much too large for it. It was a long journey. They crawled along. It almost looked as if the peasant was holding his beast back, instead of urging it on. Marescal lost his temper. He seemed, indeed, to have lost all control whatever over himself and whined: “We shall never get there—never. What a jade your horse is! Look here: I’ll give you ten francs if we catch that train. What about it?” The country appeared to him hideous, peopled with phantoms and teaming with detectives on the trail of the detective Marescal. He could not endure the thought of passing the night in this district in which the body of the girl he had sent to her death was lying. “Twenty francs!” he said. And all at once, losing his head wholly, he shouted: “Fifty francs! I’ll give you fifty francs! It isn’t further than a mile and a quarter. A mile and a quarter in seven minutes, dammit! It can be done! Get on, curse you, thrash that nanny-goat of a horse! Fifty francs!” On the instant the peasant became furiously energetic, and, as if he had only been waiting for this magnificent offer, set himself to lash the nanny-goat with such ardor that it set off at a gallop. “Look out! Mind what you’re doing! You’ll have us in the ditch!” cried Marescal. The countryman seemed not to care a hang whether they went into the ditch or not. Fifty francs! He beat his horse as hard as he could with a stick fitted with a large copper ferule. The maddened beast galloped faster and faster. The cart leaped from one side of the road to the other, Marescal grew more and more terrified. “But it’s idiotic!” he shouted. “You’re going to upset us! Go slower, confound you! You’re mad, I tell you—mad! That’s it, you fool! Here we go!” They went, indeed. The countryman clumsily pulled the wrong rein; the cart made a wilder jump and the whole outfit, cart, driver, passenger and load, plunged into the ditch in such a disastrous fashion that the countryman and Marescal found themselves on their stomachs with the cart on the top of them while the horse, entangled in the harness, with its heels in the air, beat a tattoo on the foot-board. Marescal presently discovered that none of his bones were broken. But the countryman was crushing him with his full weight. He tried to push him off. He could not. Then he heard a kindly voice murmur in his ear: “Could you oblige me with a light, Rudolph?” Marescal felt his body chill from head to foot. Death and only death could produce that impression of limbs already stiff and cold that nothing would ever warm again. He muttered through chattering teeth: “The man of the express!” “The man of the express, the very man,” echoed the voice at his ear-hole. “The man of the terrace!” moaned Marescal.