He gave a start and turned round.
Bursts of coarse laughter rang out, and his eyes encountered seated round him the Parisian, the Burglar, the Caid and the Joker. His dreams had carried him so far away that he had failed to hear their approach.
The four men were his worst enemies. They never relented, and as a result he had not hesitated latterly to get himself imprisoned for months together in the île St. Joseph, the island of silence, which was near, and reserved for those who committed offenses in the convict settlement or whose feelings rebelled against the convict gang.
In order to avoid those four monsters who tormented him with their infernal mischief-making and their abominable jokes, he tried to fasten a quarrel on one of the convict guards by seriously threatening him, for which he suffered the terrible punishment of internment on the adjoining island, where the overseers themselves were not permitted to communicate with the prisoners by word of mouth, but only by signs and in writing.
He left his solitary confinement with a feeling of regret, especially as Chéri-Bibi, the astonishing bandit who had terrorized the world for so many years—Chéri-Bibi had made a friend of him—was no longer there to silence by a frown the loathsome Burglar or the Parisian himself.
Not that Chéri-Bibi was very far away. He was for the time being behind bars in the principal building, and the Nut peeping through them one morning when he was on fatigue duty, sweeping the courtyards, caught sight of him and exchanged a few secret signs of friendship. It was done in a flash, for the sergeant of the guard had entered the courtyard, and, straightway, such volleys of insults were poured forth from the rows of cells fronted with iron bars, that the hapless sergeant sounded the call for the fatigue party, and ordered the cooks' mates who were bringing along the soup to clear the courtyard, declaring in his wrath that he would leave the "lifers" to starve and rot for three days.
Above the shouting of threats and the hideous tumult the Nut could hear Chéri-Bibi's strident and vociferous laugh.
Neither the Parisian nor the Burglar nor the Caid nor the Joker would have run the risk in this way of being sent to solitary confinement. They managed to have a good time, standing in some favor with the authorities, to whom they secretly related what they wanted to know about the state of mind or the plans of escape of their fellow-convicts, reaping no little reward for their treachery.
And even when their natural disposition to fight or plunder got the better of them, they merely "copped," as a punishment, the job of "taking a stroll with the wood," which meant that they had to move heavy planks from one place to another for several hours a day, merely to take them back again to the spot whence they came.
Just then, as they began to annoy the Nut, they were working in leisurely fashion at certain odds and ends intended to be exchanged, when a chance visitor appeared, for packets of tobacco or small change. Arigonde, otherwise the Parisian, had just finished engraving with a knife on a shark's jawbone the fateful words: The Convict's Tomb.