The singer seemed to fall off into a drunken doze before the song was finished; but Lenoir, the poet, continued with the entertainment by reciting some doggerel about the slow and horrid strangulation of a police spy.
This did not make Frank feel any more at ease, but, from his manner, one could not have surmised that he was in the least disturbed.
Wynne had taken a seat. He was sucking the head of his stick, staring about him in a blank manner, and saying some witless thing now and then.
Lenoir finished his “poem,” and Vaugirad tried to start up a conversation with Wynne. He asked the young newspaper man where he was from, and Wynne said London. Then Vaugirad asked twenty more questions, and Wynne lied deftly in answering each one.
But Frank saw something that was unseen to the young newspaper correspondent.
Behind Wynne’s back sat Emile Durant, listening to every word, the expression of a murderer on his evil face. His attitude and the baleful glow in his eyes gave the boy a feeling of nameless horror.
And now it seemed to Frank that he had unwittingly walked into a deadly trap. A feeling of oppression, a sense of deadly and terrible danger, bore down on him.
Bornier appeared uneasy. Frank half believed the man was dreading something he felt sure must happen.
Even the pictures of the noted anarchists on the walls seemed to glower at the two young Americans, and it appeared that the bloodstained head of the fellow beneath the guillotine was about to denounce them with its open mouth.
The long, snaky fingers of Montparnasse, the pickpocket, were twisting and curling over each other as his hands met on the table where they rested. How easily they might snatch a purse or close about the throat of a victim.