Part 72 (1/2)

The van was now filled with a formidable growling. She recognised it as a repet.i.tion of the sound she had heard when nearing her sinister rendezvous.

Bobinette understood!... She knew!... It was a bear!... It had been asleep. She had waked it!

Fantomas had shut her in with a bear: she was to be devoured alive!

Bobinette softly withdrew to the other side of the van. She waited. No growling sound reached her. The bear must have gone to sleep again.

She could hear its heavy breathing. As the air became exhausted in the confined s.p.a.ce the noisome odour of the beast caught her by the throat.... What was she to do? Bobinette asked herself this again and again as the slow and dreadful hours of that night wore on.

”The bear sleeps,” she said to herself; ”but he will wake in the morning hungry: he will hurl himself on me and I shall be done for!”

After interminable hours of waiting, of aching immobility, of dull agony of mind, the interior of the van was becoming slowly visible....

She had listened to the lessening fury of the wind: the rain had ceased. The wan light of early day came through the cracks in the planking. Bobinette could see the bear waking up: it turned, yawned: suddenly it fixed its eyes on her and crouched.

What should she do? What could she do?

Bobinette had once read that the human eye could frighten a wild beast into submission: she forced herself to stare at the animal with concentrated energy. Alas! she was too frightened herself to terrify a ferocious animal into harmless submission!

The bear licked itself. As though sure of its prey, which he would presently fall upon and rend, he took his time and proceeded to make his toilette.

It was grotesquely tragic, the leisurely tranquillity of this beast face to face with this girl who could count the seconds of life remaining to her.

Now and again Bobinette could hear the rapid pa.s.sings of motor-cars on the high road outside, speeding to Paris or Versailles, pa.s.sing the van abandoned, left derelict by the wayside. Far, indeed, were these pa.s.sers from suspecting the terrible drama of which it was the theatre.

Call out?

That were madness! Her cries might pa.s.s unheeded. Why should she suppose the drivers of these cars racing on their appointed way would stop, locate the cry, and succour her? No, it would but excite the anger of the bear, rouse it to action, thus hasten her own dreadful end!...

A man was walking on the Sceaux road--walking fast. He wore the clothes of a working man. He was leading a sorry nag.... The man halted and let the nag go free. A sound had caught his ear--a growling sound.

He listened intently.

”Did I imagine it?” he murmured.

Again that growling, punctuated by a woman's sharp scream. The man was off at racing speed towards the van, which was but a hundred yards away.

”Great Heaven! Shall I arrive too late?” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the man.

Reaching it, breathless, he glued his ear to the door. The van shook with the movement and growling of some beast of prey about to spring.

The man drew back, rushed forward, hurled himself against the door and drove it inwards.

A shot broke the silence of the morning.

The man rolled over the body of the bear, shot dead through the heart.

The man freed himself; escaped the convulsive movement of its limbs, and crawled towards a crumpled heap huddled in a corner of this tragic stage. Bobinette's poor face, exposed to view, was slashed and torn: it bore the dreadful claw-marks of the bear.