"Why, you're mad, Chief! you'll kill yourself!"
"Let go, you ass!" roared Don Luis. "It's they! Let me be, can't you!"
The carriages filed past. He tried to jump on to another footboard. But the two men were clinging to him, some railway porters came to their assistance, the station-master ran up. The train moved out of the station.
"Idiots!" he shouted. "Boobies! Pack of asses that you are, couldn't you leave me alone? Oh, I swear to Heaven!"
With a blow of his left fist he knocked the ticket collector down; with a blow of his right he sent Mazeroux spinning; and shaking off the porters and the station-master, he rushed along the platform to the luggage-room, where he took flying leaps over several batches of trunks, packing-cases, and portmanteaux.
"Oh, the perfect fool!" he mumbled, on seeing that Mazeroux had let the power down in the car. "Trust him, if there's any blunder going!"
Don Luis had driven his car at a fine rate during the day; but that night the pace became vertiginous. A very meteor flashed through the suburbs of Le Mans and hurled itself along the highroad. Perenna had but one thought in his head: to reach the next station, which was Chartres, before the two accomplices, and to fly at Sauverand's throat. He saw nothing but that: the savage grip of his two hands that would set Florence Levasseur's lover gasping in his agony.
"Her lover! Her lover!" he muttered, gnashing his teeth. "Why, of course, that explains everything! They have combined against their accomplice, Marie Fauville;
