“Oh, Moche, Moche, what a fool you are!—and just when you’re thinking yourself the cleverest rogue unhung! What is the fellow after? By the Lord, he’s hauling out of the mud an iron box, a cashbox. Full of yellow boys, I wager. Egad, there’s enough and to spare there to pay the greediest of Fantômas’ regular workers for their trouble! Moche, my boy, if I wanted to play you a nasty trick, I’d go slap off and tell the gang what I’ve seen, and I promise you that, two hours from now, when they’d caught you, you’d be having a devilish bad half-hour! Luckily for you, I prefer, in Juve’s interests, to find out what you’re proposing to do with your treasure. Are you an honest agent, is it just a trust confided to you by Fantômas? _Or_, are you by way of robbing your master and all his confederates? Oh, ho! it looks as if the villain is preparing to answer my question himself.” For now, with a meditative air, Moche was pulling at his hideous red whiskers, one after the other. Then he took out his watch and made several unavailing attempts to see the time, for the night was still so dark he had to wait for a flash of lightning before he could read the hour, while the wind was blowing too violently for him to dream of lighting a match. When at last he was able to make out the face, a cry of annoyance broke from his lips: “Gone three already!”—and without a moment’s delay he started off at a run in the direction of Alfort, gripping under his left arm the precious box, which he had hastily reclosed. Where was he off to? Fandor took prompt measures to find out, and the other had not gone three hundred paces before his steps were being dogged by the pursuing journalist. The pace was hot. It was plain that Fantômas’ man of business was bent on completing before daylight whatever the job it was he had made up his mind to do. But to manage it he must make all possible haste, for, as Moche had noted, it was by now three o’clock in the morning. “God Almighty!” Fandor swore, pressing on harder still, “what a racer the scoundrel is!... Where are we? We’re clean through Alfort, and there’s nothing else but that hovel ahead there; it looks deserted, but it’s that way and nowhere else Moche is making across country. Ah, ha! I think I’m going to know!” Moche, in fact, was making straight for a tumble-down building that stood empty and abandoned in the middle of a wide stretch of waste ground, its shutters hanging from their hinges, its walls dropping to pieces, and a general look of poverty-stricken dilapidation brooding over all. Like a person familiar with the locality and having a perfect right to march in without knocking, he pushed open the door, a strong and heavy one. Still, the idea occurred to him that tramps might have taken refuge in the ramshackle hut for shelter from the cold out of doors; so he took his revolver in hand, and in he went.