As he heard the ominous words, Juve shuddered, brave man as he was. The police-officer in the course of his adventurous life had gone through such ups and downs of fortune, taken part in such desperate struggles, confronted such dangers, that he was proof against all contingencies; yet he could not help trembling, for he felt a clear and definite presentiment that his last hour was on the point of striking. The incidents of the evening before had astounded him, and despite his imperturbable coolness, the detective could not but shudder to recall the terrible hours he had lived through since then. In fact, what had occurred in M. Fuselier’s room at the Palais and the brutal fashion in which Juve had been kidnapped, overpassed all limits in the way of fantastic extravagance. Not only had the gang of scoundrels taken him unawares, thrown themselves upon him, seized and pinioned him, in the very Palais de Justice itself, but they had actually carried him off by climbing down the scaffoldings running outside the windows of the building and got clear away. Then Juve, gagged and bound, unable to stir a finger, had been pitched into a car which had been driven off at full speed without the officer being able to gather the faintest inkling of where he was being taken. Still blindfolded by a handkerchief tied tight over his eyes, he had been led into a house, where he had waited in silence and agonizing suspense to know the decision his abductors would come to regarding his fate. As he recalled these events, his mind turned instinctively on what he had seen last, Fuselier attacked and terrorized, the last sound he had heard, the voice of the American detective, Tom Bob, the man he dreaded and suspected. Then despair overwhelmed him at the thought of the ever-accumulating proofs of the persistent ill-fortune that pursued him. In truth he was to be pitied! He had been captured the very day he had at long last regained his freedom, when, cleared of the dreadful accusations that hung over his head, he was about to resume the struggle with the help and co-operation of that mighty organization, that all-powerful combination, formed by the police and the Criminal Bureau together. Now, in a moment, as the result of an odious plot, a plot no man could well have foreseen, he found himself plunged once more into the dark depths from which he was just emerging.