Patrice now joined Don Luis, who was crossing the road. All the way down the Seine are wharves, built on the bank of the river and used for loading and unloading vessels. Barges put in alongside, discharge their cargoes, take in fresh ones and often lie moored one next to the other. At the spot where Don Luis and Patrice descended by a flight of steps there was a series of yards, one of which, the one which they reached first, appeared to be abandoned, no doubt since the war. It contained, amid a quantity of useless materials, several heaps of bricks and building-stones, a hut with broken windows and the lower part of a steam-crane. A placard swinging from a post bore the inscription: BERTHOU WHARFINGER & BUILDER. Don Luis walked along the foot of the embankment, ten or twelve feet high, above which the quay was suspended like a terrace. Half of it was occupied by a heap of sand; and they saw in the wall the bars of an iron grating, the lower half of which was hidden by the sand-heap shored up with planks. Don Luis cleared the grating and said, jestingly: "Have you noticed that the doors are never locked in this adventure? Let's hope that it's the same with this one." His theory was confirmed, somewhat to his own surprise, and they entered one of those recesses where workmen put away their tools. "So far, nothing out of the common," said Don Luis, switching on an electric torch. "Buckets, pick-axes, wheelbarrows, a ladder. . . . Ah! Ah! Just as I expected: rails, a complete set of light rails! . . . Lend me a hand, captain. Let's clear out the back. Good, that's done it." Level with the ground and opposite the grating was a rectangular opening exactly similar to the one in the basin. The wire was visible above, with a number of hooks hanging from it. "So this is where the bags arrived," Don Luis explained. "They dropped, so to speak, into one of the two little trollies which you see over there, in the corner. The rails were laid across the bank, of course at night; and the trollies were pushed to a barge into which they tipped their contents." "So that . . . ?" "So that the French gold went this way . . . anywhere you like . . . somewhere abroad." "And you think that the last eighteen hundred bags have also been despatched?" "I fear so." "Then we are too late?" Don Luis reflected for a while without answering. Patrice, though disappointed by a development which he had not foreseen, remained amazed at the extraordinary skill with which his companion, in so short a time, had succeeded in unraveling a portion of the tangled skein. "It's an absolute miracle," he said, at last. "How on earth did you do it?" Without a word, Don Luis took from his pocket the book which Patrice had seen lying on his knees, _The Memoirs of Benjamin Franklin_, and motioned to him to read some lines which he indicated with his finger. They were written towards the end of the reign of Louis XVI and ran: