"Gilles Perdie would have got off, if it had not been for me," he said, with excusable pride. "The police had been hunting for him ten long days, when I put them on the right scent. We knew that he had not gone far from the scene of the crime--for there had been no time for escape, you see. The murder was found out an hour after the woman's death. He was hunted for in every hole and corner within a radius of a mile. No one had seen him leave the premises. No one had set eyes on him since the murder, which occurred in the early morning in October, when it is not light before six. 'How do you know that he ever did leave that house?' I asked one day, meaning the Red Cross, a workman's eating-house in the Rue Galande. He was cellarman there, cellarman and _terreur_ combined. My comrades laughed at me. They had searched the Red Cross from cellar to garret, they had not left an inch of the building unexplored. 'Have you looked in the empty casks?' I asked. Yes, they had looked in the empty casks. The cellar was very neatly arranged, the empty casks in a row on one side, the full ones on the other. My friends protested that they were not such fools as to have overlooked an empty cask. 'Who knows?' I said; 'we will go there this afternoon and overhaul those barrels.' Need I tell you the result? It is history. There was one empty hogshead, artfully pushed in a corner, last in the rank of unbroached hogsheads. The open end had been turned towards the wall, and in that empty hogshead, in that rat-haunted cellar, Gilles Perdie had contrived to exist for ten days, by the aid of his victim's daughter, a child of seven years old, who lived in the house, and whom he threatened to kill as he had killed her mother, if she told any one about him, or failed to carry him food and drink twice a day. There, amidst vermin and ordure, he had lived, coiled up in his hogshead, and perhaps not much worse off than some among the poor of Paris, whose only crime is poverty." "You have a right to boast of your scent, Monsieur, after such a triumph as that." "A bagatelle, Monsieur, one of the feeblest of my cases: but it made a great hit at the time. My portrait appeared in three different newspapers, side by side with that of the murderer." "A distinguished honour. And now, if you will be kind enough to give me the further information which you promised as to names and details?" "Monsieur Effcotte, you are Mr. Distin's friend, and for you I will do what I would hardly do for my own brother. I will trust you with one of my books." "You are extremely obliging."