The lieutenant turned his head sharply, and for a moment the naval officer and the free sea-rover looked at each other gloomily. When Peyrol spoke again he had changed his mood.
"Why should I fear anybody? I owe nothing to anybody. I have given them up the prize ship in order and everything else, except my luck; and for that I account to nobody," he added darkly.
"I don't know what you are driving at," the lieutenant said after a moment of thought. "All I know is that you seem to have given up your share of the prize money. There is no record of you ever claiming it."
Peyrol did not like the sarcastic tone. "You have a nasty tongue," he said, "with your damned trick of talking as if you were made of different clay."
"No offence," said the lieutenant, grave but a little puzzled. "Nobody will drag out that against you. It has been paid years ago to the Invalides' fund. All this is buried and forgotten."
Peyrol was grumbling and swearing to himself with such concentration that the lieutenant stopped and waited till he had finished.
"And there is no record of desertion or anything like that," he continued then. "You stand there as disparu. I believe that after searching for you a little they came to the conclusion that you had come by your death somehow or other."
"Did they? Well, perhaps old Peyrol is dead. At any rate he has buried himself here." The rover suffered from great instability of feelings for he passed in a flash from melancholy into fierceness. "And he was quiet enough till you came sniffing around this hole. More than once in my life I had occasion to wonder how soon the jackals would have a chance to dig up my carcass; but to have a naval officer come scratching round here was the last thing. . . ." Again a change came over him. "What can you want here?" he whispered, suddenly depressed.
The lieutenant fell into the humour of that discourse. "I don't want to disturb the dead," he said, turning full to the rover who after his last words had fixed his eyes on the ground. "I want to talk to the gunner Peyrol."
Peyrol, without raising his eyes from the ground, growled: "He isn't here. He is disparu. Go and look at the papers again. Vanished. Nobody here."