Paul Rodier, a good reporter, had learned before his confreres of the arrest of the young man, and, abandoning what he had called his trail of the Woman in Black, he abruptly whirled about and quickly invented a sensational biography of the newcomer. Charles-Henri Pradès, or rather Carlos Pradès, as he called himself, had been a _gaucho_, a buffalo tamer, a cowboy, using, turn by turn, the American revolver against the Redskins and the Mexican lasso against the Yankees. The journalist had obtained a signature, picked up by the lodging-house keeper where the guilty man had been hunted down, and published in his paper the autographic characters; he had deduced from them some dramatic observations. Cooper, of former times; Gustave Aymard, of yesterday; Rudyard Kipling or Bret Harte, of to-day, had never met a personage more dreadful, and at the same time more heroic. Carlos Pradès used the navaja (Spanish knife) with the terrible rapidity of a Catalan. He had felt since the days of Buenos Ayres a fierce hate for the ex-Consul, and this crime, which some of his brother reporters, habitually indifferently informed (it was Paul Rodier who spoke), now attributed alone to the avarice of this Cambrioleur from over the sea; he, Rodier, gave this note as the cause of vengeance, and built thereupon a romance which made his readers shiver. Or, rather, he said nothing outright. He permitted one a glimpse into, he outlined, one knows not what, dark history. Soon he made this Carlos Pradès the instrument and the arm of an association of vengeance. He could even believe that there was anarchy in the affair. Then he had the young man mixed in some love affair, a drama of passion, with Argentine Republic for the theatre. As a result he had succeeded in making interesting the man whom Bernardet had pushed a few nights before into the station house. And, what was a singular thing, the reporter had divined part of the truth. It was still another episode in his past that Rovère expiated when he found himself one day, in his salon in the Boulevard de Clichy, face to face with the man who was to be his murderer. At Buenos Ayres, the ex-Consul had been associated in a large agricultural enterprise with a man whose hazardous speculations, play and various adventures had completely ruined him, and who had left two children--a young girl whom Rovère thought for a moment of marrying, and a son, younger--poor beings of whom the Consul, paying his partner's debts, seemed the natural protector. Jean Pradès, in committing suicide--he had killed himself, frightened at the magnitude of his debts--had commended his children to Rovère's care.