But not for your amazing impudence, I thought. Yet the wonder amused me. Turning to peer unblushingly into our compartment, he caught sight of the rücksack.
“Voilà!” he said. “The snail’s pack, containing all his equipment.”
“Equipment for two,” said I, inwardly tickled.
“So?” he commented; and gave the Gallic shrug. “It is to double the burden and halve the loneliness. I, too, Monsieur, carry my all upon my back like the snail; but, hélas! with me it is the one burden and the undivided loneliness. Monsieur is a happy man.”
He did not look unhappy, himself; I think he was pleased with his own representation of his solitariness; but he thought well to sigh, and immediately thereon to check that ebullition of secret grief, as if to hide it from me.
“You travel together?” he said. “By what itinerary?”
“To Nîmes,” I said shortly; “thence possibly to Arles.”
“By a wonder,” he answered, “that is my own destined route. Without doubt this is a providence to bring us better acquainted.”
It had not been his route, I could have sworn, until that moment; and at that moment Fifine joined us, unseen by the stranger, whose eyes were suddenly riveted upon a man issuing from a woodside with a gun on his arm.
“Sacré chien!” he growled, in a vibrant undertone: “behold the assassin, bent on his cursed mission to still God’s music!”