"Monsieur le Maire," said he, "I should like to examine the premises, and beg that you will have the kindness to accompany me." "With the permission of Monsieur le Maire," said Aristide. "I too will come." "Certainly," said the Mayor. "The more intelligences concentrated on the affair the better." "I am not of that opinion," said the detective. "It is the opinion of Monsieur le Maire," said Aristide rebukingly, "and that is enough." When they reached the house--distances are short in Perpignan--they found policemen busily engaged with tape measures around the premises. Old Madame Coquereau in a clean white linen dressing jacket, bare-headed, defying the keen air, stood grim and eager in the midst of them. "Good morning, Monsieur Pujol, what do you think of this?" "A veritable catastrophe," said Aristide. She shrugged her iron shoulders. "I tell him it serves him right," she said, cuttingly. "A sensible person keeps his money under his mattress and not in a tin machine by a window which anyone can get at. I wonder we've not been murdered in our beds before." "_Ah, Maman!_" expostulated the Mayor of Perpignan. But she turned her back on him and worried the policemen. They, having probed, and measured, and consulted with the detective, came to an exact conclusion. The thief had climbed over the back wall--there were his footsteps. He had entered by the kitchen door--there were the marks of infraction. He had broken open the safe--there was the helpless condition of the lock. No one in Perpignan, but José Puégas, with his bad, socialistic, Barcelona blood, could have done it. These brilliant results were arrived at after much clamour and argument and imposing _procès verbal_. Aristide felt strangely depressed. He had narrated his story of the pig-headed masquer to unresponsive ears. Here was a melodramatic scene in which he not only was not playing a leading part, but did not even carry a banner. To be less than a super in life's pageant was abhorrent to the nature of Aristide Pujol. Moodily he wandered away from the little crowd. He hated the police and their airs of gods for whom exists no mystery. He did not believe in the kitchen-door theory. Why should not the thief have simply entered by the window of the study, which like the kitchen, was on the ground floor? He went round the house and examined the window by himself. No; there were no traces of burglary. The fastenings of the outside shutters and the high window were intact. The police were right. Suddenly his quick eye lit on something in the gravel path and his heart gave a great leap. It was a little round pink disc of confetti. Aristide picked it up and began to dance and shake his fist at the invisible police. "Aha!" he cried, "now we shall see who is right and who is wrong!"