In a corner of an alcove the sergeant was bending down.
“What’s that, Beauprè?” Gerard cried again, and the sergeant stood up and faced him. He was holding in his hands the blue tunic of an officer; and on the breast of it a row of the big French medals tinkled and glinted.
Gerard took the tunic reverently from the sergeant’s hands. It was all cluttered with blood, and stabbed through and through. It had the badges of Paul’s rank, and still discernible on a linen label inside the collar was Paul’s name. It was here, then, in this house, that Paul Ravenel had been done to death. The tunic which Gerard held in his hand was the conclusive proof. He stood in the centre of the patio, so pleasant, so quiet now, with the shafts of bright sunlight breaking upon the tiles. Who had lived here? What dreadful scene had been staged in this empty house? Gerard shivered a little as he thought upon it. The knives at their slow work—the man, his friend, slowly losing, whilst the heart still beat and the nerves stabbed, all the semblance of a man!
“But they shall pay,” he said aloud, in a bellowing voice; and while he shouted, a perplexity began to trouble him. He opened the door leading from the court into the outer passage. This passage was cumbered with the splintered panels, the bolts, the heavy transverse bars which the patrol’s battering ram had demolished. How was it that in this empty house the door was still barricaded from within? He returned into the court and saw that the sergeant had pushed aside a screen at the back, and in a recess had discovered a second door. This door was merely locked, and there was no key in the lock. It was quickly opened. The Karouein river raced and foamed amidst its boulders, and between the river and the house wall there ran a tiny path.
Gerard crossed to the door.
“Yes, that way they went. When, I wonder? Perhaps when we were actually beating on the door.”
He unpinned the medals from his friend’s blood-stained tunic and wrapped them up in a handkerchief. There might be somewhere a woman who would love to keep them bright. Paul Ravenel talked little about his own affairs. Who could tell? If there were no one, he could treasure them himself in memory of a good comrade.
Meanwhile there was an immediate step to take. A crowd had gathered in the gateway and about the door in the dark tunnel.
“Whose is this house?” Gerard asked, and there were many voices raised at once with the answer:
“Si Ahmed Driss of Ouezzan.”