"Why, Scott, what's struck you? You look as if you had lost your last friend!"
"Wharton," replied John at last, "I found Mademoiselle Lannes and her servants, Antoine and Suzanne Picard here, come as requested by letter, to meet her brother Philip. I found them in the cathedral waiting, and we went to the Hôtel de l'Europe, where she and I dined together."
"Good Heavens! You don't mean to say she was there under the awful fire of our guns?"
"No, else I should not have been with you. Weber, the trusty Alsatian, of whom you know, came to us in the town. It was he who had borne the letter from Philip to Mademoiselle Julie. We thought we saw Germans in the outskirts of Chastel. We did not find any, but when we came back to the Hôtel de l'Europe, where we left them, Mademoiselle Julie and her servants, the Picards, were gone."
"Perhaps they were alarmed by the German advance and have taken refuge somewhere in the woods. If so, it will be easy to find them, Scott."
"No, they're not there. They're in the hands of the enemy. I shouldn't mind it so much if she were merely a captive of the Germans, but that man Auersperg has taken her again."
"How can you possibly know that to be true, Scott?"
Then John told the story of the register, and of the successive writing of the names. Cotton heard him, too, and his face was very grave.
"It's a pity Bougainville couldn't have come earlier," he said. "We might not only have saved Mademoiselle Julie but have captured this Prince of Auersperg as well. Then we should indeed have had a prize. But the wireless could not talk through all the storm and we had no warning of the German movement until the snowfall died down."
"We'll stay on the site of Chastel at least until morning, which can't be far away."
"It will be daylight in two hours," he said.
"Oh, by the way," exclaimed Carstairs, "what became of Weber?"
"We were making our escape in Mademoiselle Lannes' automobile when we ran into a detachment of Germans. Our car was riddled; we both dodged for shelter and that was the last I saw of him."
"He escaped. I wager a pound to a shilling on it. The Alsatian not only has borrowed the nine lives of a cat, but he has nine original ones of his own."
"I feel sure, like you, Carstairs, that he has escaped and I certainly hope so. He's a clever man who has the faculty of turning up at the right time."