In a few steps we were at the inn door. It was standing open. The old dust-covered lanthorn was hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, sputtering forth its uncertain yellow light. To my dismay I saw De Marsac sitting directly under it at the table. He seemed impatient for he was twisting his mustache with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and drumming nervously with the other. My captor had just shoved me across the threshold. He opened his mouth to speak when two fellows in the garb of common soldiers brushed roughly past. Their faces were white from fear, and from the way they were breathing I judged that they had been running. They threw themselves at De Marsac’s feet. “My lord!” they cried. “The highwayman of Tours is running wild in the forest! He has shot three of your men already. If you will——” My captor broke him off. He advanced with his chest thrown out and his head high in the air. “The highwayman of Tours is dead!” he growled in a voice deep in his throat. “I shot him with my own hand. His body lies under a tree about a league to the south on the left of the road. To prove it, here is the boy who accompanied him.” He stopped for a moment and gazed proudly at De Marsac. “My lord,” he went on, “the fifty crowns that you have offered as a reward is mine!” De Marsac rose slowly from his seat. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and let his eye roam over me. He smacked his lips and smiled, as though I was a tender morsel he was about to devour. “I was glad you weren’t hanged this morning,” he said with a sly leer. “If you had died, my scheme would have gone astray. I’m going to care for you now like a bird in a cage. I’m going to send you down the river to a safe, snug place where you will come to no harm.” He rubbed his hands together like a merchant who has just made a clever deal. “When your brother sees fit to surrender his estates, I shall give you back to him. Till then——” He raised his arm and snapped his fingers in the air. He turned to the fellow who had taken me and clapped him on the back. “You have earned every groat of your reward, my man,” he said, and drew from an inside pocket a leather purse. “I am proud of you.” Then he counted out upon the table the fifty crowns in glittering pieces of gold. My captor was beside himself from joy and bashfulness—joy, that he had been the lucky one to effect my capture, bashful, that he was made so much of by so great a person as De Marsac. He wanted to mutter a word of thanks, but he choked in trying it, so that all he could do was to hang his head and turn his face aside. But after he had put the money in his jerkin, he took me by the arm and led me to a place at the far end of the room. By merest chance it was the very seat I had occupied the night before. “You have been the means of making me a rich man, lad,” he puffed as he sat down. “And I’m going to feast you to your heart’s content for it.”