To our right was the Gate of Spain, its drawbridge and guardhouse; far beneath us, at the foot of the city walls, on whose parapet we sat, was the bottom of the dry moat; while to our left front, across the moat and a hundred meters beyond its outer bank, was the Spring of St. Leon and the cluster of ancient trees that half concealed it. Though their crests almost met, their trunks were widely separated, so that the spring and its low, hemispherical cupola were in a small clearing.

The sun was setting. Long shadows marched slowly across the gently rolling ground beneath us, and to our front. Pierre d’Artois, as he took from his case and lit a villainous Bastos, stared at the Spring of St. Leon. And then he resumed the thread of his rambling discourse, continuing a tale he had so often before begun and abruptly abandoned.

“With that lunge I could have impaled the devil himself, for I had him swinging like a windmill, skillful swordsman though he was. Yes, and had it really been Monsieur the Devil himself, and not Santiago with whom I crossed swords, I still hold that someone must have struck me down from the rear to save his lord and master!”

He spoke of his secret duel by moonlight with Santiago the Spaniard, two years ago, in the small clearing by this very Spring of St. Leon, and of the outcome of the affair: how, as after hard, fierce fighting he had slipped through the Spaniard’s guard to impale him with a thrust to the chest, there had been an awful flare of elemental flame, followed by blackness and oblivion; how Jannicot, his servant, had come in search of him, carried him back to the car; and how, on the return trip, they had found Don Santiago dead beneath his own car, wrecked on the way from Spain, hurrying, apparently, to keep his rendezvous with d’Artois.

“Since Santiago never reached Bayonne to meet me, then who? A double? For that stout wrist was not that of an apparition, nor do illusions or phantoms leave footprints, nor can they beat one’s blade so that one’s arm tingles up to the shoulder. Impossible!”

“But then what did hit you?”

“Who knows? Perhaps a confederate, despite our having agreed to meet without seconds. But by the time I recovered full possession of my wits, several days later, any bruise the blow might have left had subsided. Yet something must have struck me …