The key was the first real clue. It put the police on the track of Tascheron, whom they arrested on the frontiers of the department, in a wood where he was awaiting the passage of a diligence. An hour later he would have started for America. Besides all this, and in spite of the care with which certain footmarks in the ploughed field and on the mud of the road had been effaced and covered up, the searchers had found in several places the imprint of shoes, which they carefully measured and described, and which were afterwards found to correspond with the soles of Tascheron’s shoes taken from his lodgings. This fatal proof confirmed the statement of the landlady. The authorities now attributed the crime to some foreign influence, and not to the man’s personal intention; they believed he had accomplices, basing this idea on the impossibility of one man carrying away the buried money; for however strong he might be, no man could carry twenty-five thousand francs in gold to any distance. If each pot contained, as it was supposed to have done, about that sum, this would have required four trips to and from the clover-patch. Now, a singular circumstance went far to prove the hour at which the crime was committed. In the terror Jeanne Malassis must have felt on hearing her master’s cries, she knocked over, as she rose, the table at her bedside, on which lay her watch, the only present the miser had given her in five years. The mainspring was broken by the shock, and the hands had stopped at two in the morning. By the middle of March (the date of the murder) daylight dawns between five and six o’clock. To whatever distance the gold had been carried, Tascheron could not possibly, under any apparent hypothesis, have transported it alone. The care with which some of the footsteps were effaced, while others, to which Tascheron’s shoes fitted, remained, certainly pointed to some mysterious assistant. Forced into hypotheses, the authorities once more attributed the crime to a desperate passion; not finding any trace of the object of such a passion in the lower classes, they began to look higher. Perhaps some bourgeoise, sure of the discretion of a man who had the face and bearing of a hero, had been drawn into a romance the outcome of which was crime. This supposition was to some extent justified by the facts of the murder. The old man had been killed by blows with a spade; evidently, therefore, the murder was sudden, unpremeditated, fortuitous. The lovers might have planned the robbery, but not the murder. The lover and the miser, Tascheron and Pingret, each under the influence of his master passion, must have met by the buried hoards, both drawn thither by the gleaming of gold on the utter darkness of that fatal night.