I said then: “I’m too tired.”
He responded: “You can leave here anything you don’t care to carry further; I’ll take care of it.”
I looked at the gendarme. I looked several blocks through him. My lip did something like a sneer. My hands did something like fists.
At this crisis along comes a little boy. May God bless all males between seven and ten years of age in France!
The gendarme offered a suggestion, in these words: “Have you any change about you?” He knew, of course, that the sanitary official’s first act had been to deprive me of every last cent. The gendarme’s eyes were fine. They reminded me of … never mind. “If you have change,” said he, “you might hire this kid to carry some of your baggage.” Then he lit a pipe which was made in his own image, and smiled fattily.
But herein the v-f-g had bust his milk-jug. There is a slit of a pocket made in the uniform of his criminal on the right side, and completely covered by the belt which his criminal always wears. His criminal had thus outwitted the gumshoe fraternity.
The gosse could scarcely balance my smaller parcel, but managed after three rests to get it to the station platform; here I tipped him something like two cents (all I had) which, with dollar-big eyes, he took and ran.
A strongly-built, groomed apache smelling of cologne and onions greeted my v-f-g with that affection which is peculiar to gendarmes. On me he stared cynically, then sneered frankly.
With a little tooty shriek the funny train tottered in. My captors had taken pains to place themselves at the wrong end of the platform. Now they encouraged me to HurryHurryHurry.
I managed to get under the load and tottered the length of the train to a car especially reserved. There was one other criminal, a beautifully-smiling, shortish man, with a very fine blanket wrapped in a water-proof oilskin cover. We grinned at each other (the most cordial salutation, by the way, that I have ever exchanged with a human being) and sat down opposite one another—he, plus my baggage which he helped me lift in, occupying one seat; the gendarme-sandwich, of which I formed the pièce de résistance, the other.