Aroused from his lethargy by the cries and reports, Larsan opened the window of his chamber and called out to us. Rouletabille, quite awake now, joined us at the same moment, and I cried out to him: “He is dead!—is dead!” “So much the better,” he said. “Take him into the vestibule of the château.” Then as if on second thought, he said: “No!—no! Let us put him in his own room.” Rouletabille knocked at the door. Nobody answered. Naturally, this did not surprise me. “He is evidently not there, otherwise he would have come out,” said the reporter. “Let us carry him to the vestibule then.” Since reaching the dead _shadow_, a thick cloud had covered the moon and darkened the night, so that we were unable to make out the features. Daddy Jacques, who had now joined us, helped us to carry the body into the vestibule, where we laid it down on the lower step of the stairs. On the way, I had felt my hands wet from the warm blood flowing from the wounds. Daddy Jacques flew to the kitchen and returned with a lantern. He held it close to the face of the dead shadow, and we recognised the keeper, the man called by the landlord of the Donjon Inn the Green Man, whom, an hour earlier, I had seen come out of Arthur Rance’s chamber carrying a parcel. But what I had seen I could only tell Rouletabille later, when we were alone. * * * * * Rouletabille and Frédéric Larsan experienced a cruel disappointment at the result of the night’s adventure. They could only look in consternation and stupefaction at the body of the Green Man. Daddy Jacques showed a stupidly sorrowful face and with silly lamentations kept repeating that we were mistaken—the keeper could not be the assailant. We were obliged to compel him to be quiet. He could not have shown greater grief had the body been that of his own son. I noticed, while all the rest of us were more or less undressed and barefooted, that he was fully clothed. Rouletabille had not left the body. Kneeling on the flagstones by the light of Daddy Jacques’s lantern he removed the clothes from the body and laid bare its breast. Then snatching the lantern from Daddy Jacques, he held it over the corpse and saw a gaping wound. Rising suddenly he exclaimed in a voice filled with savage irony:— “The man you believe to have been shot was killed by the stab of a knife in his heart!” I thought Rouletabille had gone mad; but, bending over the body, I quickly satisfied myself that Rouletabille was right. Not a sign of a bullet anywhere—the wound, evidently made by a sharp blade, had penetrated the heart. Chapter XXIII The Double Scent I had hardly recovered from the surprise into which this new discovery had plunged me, when Rouletabille touched me on the shoulder and asked me to follow him into his room. “What are we going to do there?” “To think the matter over.”