The wound that seemed to have caused his death was a transverse cut right across the skull, and it seemed to have been made by a blunt instrument.
His feet and his hands were bare. His feet looked like those of a man used to much walking; his hands were those of a working man.
Beyond these details he was, as I have said, completely unknown in our district.
Two days passed, during which everyone held forth upon the event at leisure; then, all at once, the rumour spread abroad that the assassin had been arrested.
He was a shepherd in M. Picot's employ.
And next we saw a crowd rushing to the corner of the rue de Largny, where a man wearing a blouse, and handcuffed, was being brought in between two mounted policemen, armed with swords.
His type of face was that of a Picardy peasant of the lowest class, coarse and cunning.
He was taken to the prison, and the gate shut after him; but the crowd continued to besiege the gate in spite of its being closed. It was far too exciting an event not to bring the whole town out. The magistrate began the inquiry, and in his first examination the accused man denied everything.
But terrible proofs were brought against him. Shepherds, as is known, sleep in log huts, near their sheep-folds. The hut of the accused, during the day in which the murder had taken place, and during the night following that on which the body had been discovered, had been only a couple of hundred paces or so from the highroad.