Has this cane anything to do with it?
Where the deuce could he have found it ?" As I had to wait twenty minutes for the train at Epinay, we entered a wine shop.

Almost immediately the door opened and Frederic Larsan made his appearance, brandishing his famous cane.
"I found it!" he said laughingly.
The three of us seated ourselves at a table.

Rouletabille never took his eyes off the cane; he was so absorbed that he did not notice a sign Larsan made to a railway employe, a young man with a chin decorated by a tiny blond and ill-kept beard.

On the sign he rose, paid for his drink, bowed, and went out.

I should not myself have attached any importance to the circumstance, if it had not been recalled to my mind, some months later, by the reappearance of the man with the beard at one of the most tragic moments of this case.