assault, the commissary understood the reason of this passive attitude:
there was no one in the boat. The enemy had escaped by swimming, leaving
in the hands of the victor a certain number of the stolen articles,
which, heaped up and surmounted by a jacket and a bowler hat, might be
taken, at a pinch, in the semi-darkness, vaguely to represent the figure
of a man.

They struck matches and examined the enemy's cast clothes. There were
no initials in the hat. The jacket contained neither papers nor
pocketbook. Nevertheless, they made a discovery which was destined to
give the case no little celebrity and which had a terrible influence on
the fate of Gilbert and Vaucheray: in one of the pockets was a
visiting-card which the fugitive had left behind... the card of Arsene
Lupin.

At almost the same moment, while the police, towing the captured skiff
behind them, continued their empty search and while the soldiers stood
drawn up on the bank, straining their eyes to try and follow the fortunes
of the naval combat, the aforesaid Arsene Lupin was quietly landing at
the very spot which he had left two hours earlier.

He was there met by his two other accomplices, the Growler and the
Masher, flung them a few sentences by way of explanation, jumped into
the motor-car, among Daubrecq the deputy's armchairs and other valuables,
wrapped himself in his furs and drove, by deserted roads, to his
repository at Neuilly, where he left the chauffeur. A taxicab brought
him back to Paris and put him down by the church of Saint-Philippe-du
-Roule, not far from which, in the Rue Matignon, he had a flat, on the
entresol-floor, of which none of his gang, excepting Gilbert, knew, a
flat with a private entrance. He was glad to take off his clothes and