"I thought when he did not get back to his seat beside me, he had lost his nerve and gone inside."

"So did I."

"Well, then?" concluded Gontran.

But the puzzle thus propounded was beyond Hector's powers of solution.  He scratched the back of his head by way of trying to extract thence a key to the enigma.

"We must have left him behind," he suggested.

"He would have shouted after us if we had," commented Gontran.  "Unless----" he added with graphic significance.

Hector shook himself like a dog who has come out of the water.  The terror of those footpads and of those pistols clicking in the dark, unpleasantly close to his head, was still upon him.

"You don't think----" he murmured through chattering teeth.

Gontran shrugged his shoulders.

"It won't be the first time," he said sententiously, "that those miscreants have added murder to their other crimes."

"Lost one of your passengers, Gontran?" queried Gilles Blaise blandly.

"If those rogues have murdered him----" quoth Gontran with an oath.

"Then you'd have to make a special declaration before the chief commissary of police, and that within an hour.  Who was your passenger, Gontran?"

"I don't know.  A quiet, well-mannered fellow.  Good company he was, too, during the first part of the way."

"What was his name?"

"I can't tell.  I picked him up at Argentan.  The box-seat was empty.  No one wanted it, for it was raining then.  He paid me his fare and scrambled up beside me.  That's all I know about him."

"What was he like?  Young or old?"

"I didn't see him very well.  It was already getting dark," rejoined Gontran impatiently.  "I couldn't look him under the nose, could I?"

"But _sacrebleu_!  Monsieur le Commissaire de Police will want to know something more than that.  Did you at least see 

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