It was with a sense of this triumph upon him that he had risen to clinch the prisoner’s condemnation. His evidence was necessarily the most damning of all, turning as it did upon the question of motive. Every thin measured word that drew from him pulled the knot tighter about the foredoomed neck. He told of the prisoner’s anger over the projected union; of his fruitless plans to betray his patron; of his disinheritance and dismissal despite; of his suggestive words to himself, when they had met later in Turin. Finally, he also swore to the knife.
Cartouche, smiling, shook a finger at him rebukingly.
“I will meet thee on that issue some day, old comrade.”
He would speak nothing in his own defence.
He was proud to have deserved a thousand hangings at their hands, he said. He was indifferent on what indictment that truth was brought home to the world. For himself, he only regretted that he had left unhung among his enemies so much intelligence as was able to formulate a plausible reason for destroying him. They were not altogether such fools as they had appeared. A little wisdom made revolution a dangerous thing. He had foolishly hoped that he had eliminated the last of it, since it had hidden itself so successfully from him. Now he must congratulate that little on its taking him effectively, unawares, behind his back. But he warned it to seek a cleverer substitute for himself than M. Léotade.
M. Léotade in consequence had much pleasure in committing him viciously to the gallows.
Bonito, when the sentence was pronounced, stood up to watch its effect upon the veiled woman. She was nowhere to be seen. An hour later, the ferment and excitement having locally subsided, and the precincts of the Court been redelivered to quietude, he put the knife—which he had begged and secured—into his pocket, parted amicably with his colleagues, and set out on foot and alone for his lodgings. These, to suit his secretiveness and his parsimony, no less than his democratic unpretence—were in a little smithy on the Argentière road. He had put up there on the occasion of his former visit. There were conveniences about the establishment of Jean Loustalot, “Forgeron et Vétérinaire.” For one thing, loafers were not tolerated in its neighbourhood, for the reason that Jean—a suspicious saturnine man, of few words and lowering aspect—could not endure that idleness should borrow a lounging zest from his labours, as if he were a cursed puppet-man. For another, he was a soaker, of the solitary unsocial type, and, given the means, could always be persuaded—whenever his room was to be preferred to his company—to withdraw into the little dwelling-house at the rear of the smithy, and there drink himself swiftly and silently into insensibility.
Anticipating, in the present instance, an occasion of the kind, Dr Bonito provided himself, on his way out of the village, with a flask of spirits, which he deposited with the knife in his pocket. He then walked slowly on, with an air as of one who was loitering in the expectancy of being joined by a comrade. It was, in fact, no engagement with him, but a premonition having all the force of one. And the event came to justify it; though later than he had looked for. The encounter only happened when he was hard upon his destination. Then instantly he was conscious that a figure was waiting for him in the dusk of the road-side.
He paused a moment. Darkness like a precipitate was beginning to settle down into the valley. From the distant village came an excited bee-like murmur. Ahead of him, some fifty feet, a welter of shapeless light, the ring and clang of an anvil, marked where the smithy stood within a clump of trees. High up on the hill opposite twinkled the lights of the Château di Rocco. He took it all in; squeezed his lips between finger and thumb; and jerked himself suddenly forward. As he passed the expectant figure, he addressed it,—
“Wait, while I get rid of Jack Smith. I will call to you in a little.”