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"Then what makes you think that this Grey is there?"

"He was two days at an opium-den in the Rue d'Oran, which is not a stone's- throw off, and was last seen at the cabaret I speak of. He was then with the man who runs the Maison d'Or. Folks knew him from my description of his hat and stick. I guessed at once that I should hear of him in a drug-shop. That's what took me to the Rue d'Oran."

"You're friends with the woman who runs this beer-shop, did you say?"

"The best possible, though I wouldn't walk with her in the Bois—not for choice, leastwise."

"Then let's get up there at once. If Grey is in the shop, the closer the eye we keep on it the better."

He assented to this, and we went off together in a closed cab. It was then almost full dusk, and threatening for a wet night. In fact, we hadn't got to the top of the Rue du Faubourg when the rain began to pelt down in earnest, the people scuttling into the cafés, and the water flooding the gutters. When at last our rickety old cab began to lumber up the slopes of Montmartre, the lamps in the streets were dancing before a stiff west wind, and the sky above us was black as ink. Where we'd got to, I couldn't for the life of me tell; but by and by Jim stopped the driver before a third-rate drinking-den, and we stepped out in a dirty street, where the mud was almost up to our ankles.