“So long then!”—and Moche, without rousing the slightest suspicion, had contrived to start back on his road to the dredger. What was he coming to do? Something underhand, evidently, for instead of advancing as the first time, walking quietly on his two feet, he was flat on his belly, crawling on the ground, as he had been doing for the last two hundred yards or more. Whose notice was the old scamp trying to evade? Doubtless it was one of the companions he had just left that he feared. Fandor was burning with impatience, albeit the temperature had fallen at the approach of the dawn, which was due in another hour. Moreover, a heavy, drenching rain-storm was beginning, accompanied by vivid flashes of forked lightning and reverberating thunderclaps. On reaching the dredger, Moche abandoned his serpentine mode of advance and rising to his feet, stepped on to the deck and made straight for the winding-crank fixed at the bottom end of the spar, to put the buckets in motion. He took the handle in both hands and with legs wide astraddle and back hunched up, set to work to turn. Looking down at the old chap from above, Fandor could not restrain a laugh. “Sweat away!” he grinned, “I’ll give you a dozen of champagne if you get the old machine to work ... God in heaven! it _is_ turning.” He had not time to say another word before he was pitched headlong into the lighter astern, among the rubbish that already half filled it and which, luckily for him, made a sort of cushion sufficiently yielding to break his fall. Nor had he time to get to his feet before the contents of the bucket that had previously hung below him, but was now suspended above his head as the chain revolved, came tumbling all over him. “Bad luck again!” was all he said, as he shifted quickly a bit to one side, so as not to be fouled again if Moche went on working the crank, which had gone on turning without further application of external force. But what now? the avalanche had stopped; what did that mean? Peeping out through the cracks in the ramshackle bulwarks of the lighter, Fandor could get an excellent view of what old Moche might be at without any risk of being seen himself. What he did see was so singular that his face lit up with a broad smile. Something was afoot of so strange a sort as to force an involuntary exclamation from his lips. “The artful dodger!” he ejaculated. What the old usurer of the Rue Saint-Fargeau was doing was, in fact, extraordinary. He had stopped the crank at the exact moment when the first bucket under water rose from the depths of the dredger’s hold. At this the old man was gazing lovingly, and it was only after he had cast a wary glance round the horizon and made sure there was no one watching his proceedings that he began groping in it with feverish eagerness. Fandor grinned like a Cheshire cat, chuckling to himself as he mentally apostrophized the old fellow: