“Nicholl!” said Michel Ardan, “this is not polite!  You must always respect your adversary; don’t be uneasy; if Barbicane is alive we shall find him, and so much the more easily that if he has not amused himself with protecting birds he must be looking for you too.  But when you have found him—­and Michel Ardan tells you this—­there will be no duel between you.”

“Between President Barbicane and me,” answered Nicholl gravely, “there is such rivalry that the death of one of us—­”

“Come, come!” resumed Michel Ardan, “brave men like you may detest one another, but they respect one another too.  You will not fight.”

“I shall fight, sir.”

“No you won’t.”

“Captain,” then said J.T.  Maston heartily, “I am the president’s friend, his alter ego; if you must absolutely kill some one kill me; that will be exactly the same thing.”

“Sir,” said Nicholl, convulsively seizing his rifle, “this joking—­”

“Friend Maston is not joking,” answered Michel Ardan, “and I understand his wanting to be killed for the man he loves; but neither he nor Barbicane will fall under Captain Nicholl’s bullets, for I have so tempting a proposition to make to the two rivals that they will hasten to accept it.”

“But what is it, pray?” asked Nicholl, with visible incredulity.

“Patience,” answered Ardan; “I can only communicate it in Barbicane’s presence.”

“Let us look for him, then,” cried the captain.

The three men immediately set out; the captain, having discharged his rifle, threw it on his shoulder and walked on in silence.

During another half-hour the search was in vain.  Maston was seized with a sinister presentiment.  He observed Captain Nicholl closely, asking himself if, once the captain’s vengeance satisfied, the unfortunate Barbicane had not been left lying in some bloody thicket.  Michel Ardan seemed to have the same thought, and they were both looking questioningly at Captain Nicholl when Maston suddenly stopped.

The motionless bust of a man leaning against a gigantic catalpa appeared twenty feet off half hidden in the grass.

“It is he!” said Maston.

Barbicane did not move.  Ardan stared at the captain, but he did not wince.  Ardan rushed forward, crying—­

“Barbicane!  Barbicane!”

No answer.  Ardan was about to seize his arm; he stopped short, uttering a cry of surprise.

Barbicane, with a pencil in his hand, was tracing geometrical figures upon a memorandum-book, whilst his unloaded gun lay on the ground.

Absorbed in his work, the savant, forgetting in his turn his duel and his vengeance, had neither seen nor heard anything.

But when Michel Ardan placed his hand on that of the president, he got up and looked at him with astonishment.

“Ah!” cried he at last; “you here!  I have found it, my friend, I have found it!”