Oh, yes, many people, officials, and hangers-on about the station had seen her.
Too much seen indeed, for the stories told were confusing and conflicting.
One facteur assured us he had helped her into the train going Amberieu way, but I thought his description very vague, although Tiler swallowed the statement quite greedily.
Another man told me quite a different story; he had seen her, and had not the slightest doubt of it, in the down train, that for Aix-les-Bains, the express via Chambery, Modane, and the Mont Cenis tunnel for Italy.
This was the true version, I felt sure.
Italy had been her original destination, and naturally she would continue her journey that way.
Why, then, Tiler asked, had she gone to Amberieu, running back as she had done with him at her heels?
To deceive him, of course, I retorted.
Was it not clear that her real point was Italy?
Why else had she returned to Culoz by the early train directly she thought she had eluded Tiler?
The reasoning was correct, but Ludovic was always a desperately obstinate creature, jealous and conceited, tenacious of his opinions, and holding them far superior to those who were cleverer and more intelligent than himself.
Then we heard the whistle of the approaching train, and we all collected on the platform.
L'Echelle, as he came from the direction of the buvette, was a little in the rear of the Colonel and the gendarmes.
I caught a look on his face not easy to interpret.
He was grinning all over it and pointing toward the Colonel with his finger, derisively.
I was not inclined to trust him very greatly, but he evidently wished us to believe that he thought very little of the Colonel, and that we might count upon his support against him.
CHAPTER XX.
There were seven of us passengers, more than enough to fill one compartment, so we did not travel together.
My lord very liberally provided first-class tickets for the whole of the party, but the Colonel took his own and paid for the gendarmes.
He refused to travel in the same carriage with the noble Earl, saying openly and impudently that he preferred the society of honest old soldiers to such a crew as ours.
L'Echelle, still sitting on the hedge, as I fancied, got in with the Colonel and his escort.
On reaching Aix-les-Bains, we found the omnibus that did the service de la ville, but the Colonel refused to enter it, and declared he would walk; he cared nothing for the degradation of appearing in the public streets as a prisoner marching between a couple of gendarmes.
He gloried in it, he said; his desire was clearly to turn the whole thing into ridicule, and the passers-by laughed aloud at this well-dressed gentleman, as he strutted along with his hat cocked, one hand on his hip, the other placed familiarly on the sergeant's arm.
He met some friends, too,—one was a person rather like himself, with the same swaggering high-handed air, who accosted him as we were passing the corner of the square just by the Hotel d'Aix.
"What ho!
Basil my boy!" cried the stranger. "In chokey?
Took up by the police?
What've you done?
Robbed a church?"
"Come on with us and you'll soon know.
No, really, come along, I may want you.
I'm going before the beak and may want a witness as to character."
"Right oh!
There are some more of us here from the old shop—Jack Tyrrell, Bobus Smith—all Mars and Neptune men.
They'll speak for a pal at a pinch.
Where shall we come?"
"To the town hall, the mairie," replied the Colonel, after a brief reference to his escort. "I've got a particular appointment there with Monsieur le Commissaire, and the Right Honourable the Earl of Blackadder."
"Oh! that noble sportsman?
What's wrong with him?
What's he been doing to you or you to him?"
"I punched his head, that's all."
"No doubt he deserved it; anyhow, Charlie Forrester will be pleased.
By-by, you'll see me again, and all the chaps I can pick up at the Cercle and the hotels near."
Then our procession passed on, the Colonel and gendarmes leading, Tiler and I with l'Echelle close behind.
We found my lord awaiting us.
He had driven on ahead in a fiacre and was standing alone at the entrance to the police office, which is situated on the ground floor of the Hotel de Ville, a pretty old-fashioned building of gray stone just facing the Etablissement Thermale, the home of the far-famed baths from which Aix-les-Bains takes its name.
"In here?" asked my lord; and with a brief wave of his hand he would have passed in first, but the officers of the law put him rather rudely aside and claimed precedence for their prisoner.
But when M. le Commissaire, who was there, seated at a table opposite his greffier, rose and bowed stiffly, inquiring our business, my lord pushed forward into the front and began very warmly, in passable French:
"I am an aggrieved person seeking justice on a wrong-doer.
I—demand justice of you—"