Mlle. Fouchette Part 10

CHAPTER III

The onset was so sudden and swift, and the animal had received such a powerful impetus from his spring, that the burly robber went down with a tremendous crash.

Man and dog rolled together in the dirt, upsetting tables and chairs and raising a terrible uproar. The desperate wretch plunged his knife again and again into the body of the enraged spaniel; the latter only clinched his teeth tighter and endeavored to tear his enemy by main brute strength.

Madame Podvin, having been diverted from her original purpose by this unexpected melee, set up a scream that would have drowned an active calliope.

"That's our bird!" shouted the man who had been serving as Fouchette's footman.

Whereupon his partner and the two agents from the Prefecture who had been waiting within fell upon the struggling pair.

It was all over in a few seconds.

Yet within that brief period Tartar lay dead from a knife-thrust in the heart, and the robber was extended alongside of his victim, his hands securely manacled upon his back.

"Hold on, gentlemen!" broke in M. Podvin at this juncture, having found his voice for the first time, "what does this mean?"

"It means, my dear Podvin, that this amiable gentleman, who has always been so handy with his knife, is wanted at the Prefecture----"

"And that you are politely requested to accompany him," added the other Central man, tapping M. Podvin on the shoulder.

"But, que diable!"

"Come! Madame will conduct the business all right, no doubt, while her patriot husband serves the State."

"That cursed dog has finished me," growled the prostrate robber.

"C'est egal! I've done for him and F---- If it had only been one of you, curse you!"

This benevolent wish was addressed to the police agent who was at that moment engaged in binding up the horrible wound in the man's throat.

Both were drenched with blood, partly from the dog and partly from the man. Le Cochon had been a.s.sisted to a sitting posture, sullen, revengeful, with murder in his black heart.

All at once his inflamed eyes rested upon something in the doorway. At first it was but casually, then fixedly, while the bloated face turned ashen.

He started to rise to his feet, and would have warded off the apparition with his hands, only they were laced in steel behind him, then, with a deep groan of terror, pitched forward upon his face, senseless.

It was Fouchette.

The others turned towards the doorway to see,--there was nothing there.

Cowering for a few moments in the darkest corner of the carriage, she had heard the voice of Tartar raised in anger, followed by the tumult.

The latter she had antic.i.p.ated with fear and trembling. She had divined at the last moment that these were agents of the police, and that the object was arrests. The noise of combat roused her fighting blood, the silence that so soon followed heated her curiosity to the boiling-point. It was intolerable. Perhaps the agents were being killed. The suspense was dreadful. She felt that she could not endure it another second.

The man had ordered her to remain in the carriage. The blinds were down; the coachman stood on the side next to the cabaret.

Come what might, she must know. So Fouchette slipped softly out on the opposite side and sneaked swiftly around the horses' heads.

The coachman on guard was for the same moment completely wrapped up in the riot that had been going on inside the Rendez-Vous pour Cochers; he saw the child just as she reached the doorway, and then he made a dash for her, grabbed her, and put her back in the carriage.

Thus, it so happened that but a single pair of eyes within had seen Fouchette, and these eyes belonged to the man who believed her to be dead.

It was for the purpose of the identification of her a.s.sailant that Fouchette had been brought to the Rendez-Vous pour Cochers. Tartar had spared her that trouble, though it was for quite another reason that le Cochon fell into the grip of the police.

The latter had experienced no difficulty in identifying Fouchette in spite of her obstinate silence. As she had come down the river from outside the barrier, it was clear that she made her living in some river suburb. A telephonic inquiry brought not only immediate confirmation from the authorities at Charenton, but had elicited the important details that brought the specials from the Prefecture down upon the suspected cabaret. In the man described as "le Cochon" the officials at once recognized a notorious escaped convict.

It was not until Fouchette was on her way back to the Prefecture that it was learned that in their prisoner, le Cochon, they also had an a.s.sa.s.sin who up to this moment had eluded arrest.

When the agent had informed her of the death of Tartar she was first overcome with grief. The sense of her utter loneliness rushed upon her. She wept convulsively. Her sorrow was bitter and profound.

"Cheer up, my child; don't give way like that."

Her companion tried now and then to comfort her in his rough way.

"Ah, monsieur! but he was the only friend I had in the world!" she sobbed.

"There, there!" he said, soothingly; "you'll have more friends. You'll be taken care of all right."

"I don't care what becomes of me, now poor Tartar's gone! He loved me!

n.o.body will ever love me like he did,--never!"

But when she had recovered from this tempest of tears it was to succ.u.mb to a tempest of wrath.

"That wretch! I'll see him under the razor!" she exclaimed, meaning the guillotine. "He tried to drown me, the a.s.sa.s.sin! Yes, I know him for an a.s.sa.s.sin,--a murderer! It was he who pushed me into the river!"

"Oho!"

"It is true! That man is a fiend,--an a.s.sa.s.sin! I am ready to tell everything, monsieur! Everything!"

Not for love of truth,--not for fear of law,--but for the love of a dog.

In this mood she was encouraged by all the wiles and insinuating ways known to the professional student of human nature. So that, when Fouchette reached the Prefecture, she had not only imparted valuable information, she had astounded her official auditor. Not altogether by what she had revealed, but quite as much by her precocious cleverness and judgment.

She was taken at once before Inspector Loup, of the Secret Service.

Fouchette was not in the least intimidated when she found herself closeted alone with this mighty personage. For she did not know the extraordinary power wielded by Inspector Loup, and was in equal ignorance of the stenographer behind the screen. She was thinking only of her revenge. She had sworn, mentally, to have the head of le Cochon. She would see him writhing under the guillotine. Not because he had tried to drown her,--she would never have betrayed him for that,--but because he had murdered her dog. She would have vengeance.

She would have overlooked his cowardly butchery of a stranger in the wood of Vincennes; but for the killing of Tartar she was ready and eager to see the head of le Cochon fall in the Place de la Roquette.

Therefore Fouchette confronted Inspector Loup intent upon her own wrongs, and with a face which might have been deemed impudent but for its premature hardness.

Inspector Loup was a tall, thin man, with small, keen, fishy eyes,--so small they seemed like beads, all pupil, so keen they glistened like diamonds, so fishy they appeared to swim round in two heavily fringed ponds. And they were always swimming,--indolently, as if it were not really worth while, but still leaving the vague and sometimes uncomfortable impression that they were on you, under you, around you, through you; that they were weighing you, a.n.a.lyzing you, and knew what was in your mind and stomach, as well as the contents of your inside pockets.

It was the habit of Inspector Loup to turn these peculiar orbs upon whoever came under his personal jurisdiction for a minute or two without uttering a word, though usually before that time had expired the individual had succ.u.mbed to their mysterious influence and was ready to make a clean breast of it.

Their awful influence upon the wrongdoer was intensified by the softness of his insinuating voice, that seemed to pry down into human secrets as a sort of intellectual jimmy, delicate but powerful, and by the noiselessness of his tread, which had the effect of creeping upon his victim preparatory to the final spring.

In other words, Inspector Loup accomplished by moral force what others believed possible only to physical intimidation. Yet those law-breakers who had presumed too much upon his gentleness had invariably come to grief, and Inspector Loup had reached his present confidential position through thrilling experiences that had left his lank body covered with honorable scars.