“Bah! leave it on the sidewalk; no fear anybody’ll come and pinch it. And besides, if they did make off with it, I guess you’d never care; for you strike me as the very image of a workman out-of-work.” A good quarter of an hour later the two men were coming out of the dram-shop, looking at once well satisfied and mysterious. The barrow was still there. Paulet buckled to again and towed it slowly up the slope of the Rue de Crimée, while Père Moche, keeping to the sidewalk, stumped along in a line with the working mason. The two confederates, who forty-eight hours earlier had come near slaughtering each other over the tragic murder of the bank messenger, presently reached the top of the incline and stopped a moment to take breath behind the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont at the opening of the Rue Botzaris. The place was admirably chosen for people wishing to talk without fear of eavesdroppers. The street was empty and in the park even not a soul could be seen afoot. Père Moche, pointing to a bench set against the palisade surrounding a piece of waste ground—the very same where some months before a woman’s body had been found hacked to pieces—was saying to his companion: “Sit down there, my boy, we’ve got to talk.” Paulet was not sorry to rest a while, for his barrow was heavy; he gladly obeyed, and the two men faced each other. “Paulet,” began M. Moche, “I told you the day before yesterday we were going to make a mighty fine thing of it, unless you proved a funk.” The apache lifted his right hand as if to take an oath. “Never,” he asseverated, “I’ve never had cold feet, and you saw yourself how I downed the bank man with a crack on the noddle; he was dead and done for quicker than it takes to tell.” Père Moche smiled, and resumed: “Very true, my lad, you know your job. But as you are so clever, d’you think you could run a man in trying the epileptic fake, eh?” “What’s that?” demanded Paulet, “what’s that mean?” “That means,” went on M. Moche, “you’ve got to upset your client, tie him up to rights, and pop him in a wheeler before he has the time to say ‘knife’.” “It’s nothing so very formidable,” remarked Paulet. But the old man proceeded. “That depends on the place where the thing’s done. Don’t you go and suppose I’m proposing to do the job in a far-away corner at night when there’s nobody by—that’d be elementary. My dear fellow, the man we’re to pack away—for you may be sure I’ve got an idea at the back of my head—we’re out to do his business in broad daylight, in the open street, in the middle of Paris!” “That’s a bit more difficult—but not impossible,” Paulet declared. Père Moche nodded approvingly. “For sure, you’ve got the guts, my lad, and I begin to think you’ll do finely for yourself yet. But just tell me how you’d set about it?”