"Ask Chéri-Bibi."
"Chéri-Bibi's dead."
"Ah, what did I tell you," exclaimed one of the warders. "Our customers here refuse to believe it."
"He was killed in the bamboo plantation. The Commandant himself was leading the battle. Bordière fired the shot. Chéri-Bibi was right up against his rifle. Seems that he turned head over heels like a rabbit. Oh, there's no mistake about it. It was bound to end like that. . . . Good-by. I'm off. . . . Oh, it's made a great to do I can tell you. You must have heard the firing on Devil's Island. There's a great stir among the convicts. But there'll be some pickings for those who find the other four. Bordière is in luck's way. He'll get extra pay this month over this Chéri-Bibi job."
The man left the room. The door was closed behind him and a great uproar of mingled amazement and incredulity arose, for the convicts found it impossible to believe the monstrous story. Chéri-Bibi let himself be knocked over like a rabbit!
Suddenly, while the warders were discussing the event at the far end of the dormitory, a flagstone was quietly raised, and the Nut and the men who were behind the warders saw Chéri-Bibi's terrible and distorted jaw emerge from the cavity.
No, Chéri-Bibi was not dead. He was not even wounded. He had played his trick of tumbling to the grounds as if he were shot dead when the warder fired his rifle, so as to distract the guards' attention from the outlet of his underground passage, which he determined to reach, whatever happened, in order to meet the Nut.
What he reckoned on had come about, and when the guards recognized the figure of Chéri-Bibi falling to the ground as he spun on his heels, they made a rush towards him uttering a shout of triumph.
Bordière, the warder, climbed the bank with a light step calculating in his mind the amount of the extra pay which a deed of this sort would be worth to him. The authorities would undoubtedly be grateful to him for relieving them of a brute whom it was so difficult to keep in his cage.
Men hurried up from all directions. The Commandant himself followed close upon them, and the report gradually spread over the island that Chéri-Bibi had at last returned to the lower regions. Some of the warders, as we have said, declared that they had seen his corpse.