"The devil! Are you deaf? Answer me, you brute!"
As Lebrenn felt himself touched by the guard's cane his face lowered, but quickly suppressing the impulse to anger and indignation, he answered calmly:
"What do you want?"
"I called you twice—eleven hundred and twenty! And you did not answer. Do you expect to escape me in that way? Look out!"
"Come, be not so brutal!" answered Lebrenn, shrugging his shoulders. "I did not answer you because I have not yet become accustomed to hearing myself called by any but my own name—and I am always forgetting that my present name is eleven hundred and twenty."
"Enough of argumentation! Step up, and come to the Commissioner of Marine."
"What for?"
"None of your business. Step up! march! quick!"
"I follow you," said Lebrenn with imperturbable calmness.
After crossing a part of the port, the guard, followed closely by the galley-slave, arrived at the door of the Commissioner in charge of the convicts.