The Nut's feet were bleeding. He would have liked to take off the rough shoes which were the regulation shoes served out by the Penitentiary Administration; but Chéri-Bibi set his face against it.
"We're going through a forest which is full of rattlesnakes, old man, and nothing is more poisonous than those reptiles. One bite is enough! Make as much noise as you can as we go along so as to drive them away—and keep your shoes on!"
They frequently used their knives to cut a path through the inextricable tangle of undergrowth, and they made two staffs for themselves, veritable boar spears, from a wood as hard as iron, called gun wood. As they proceeded they beat the thickets right and left, and often heard the spring of some wild animal as it took itself off in the darkness. At length dawn suddenly broke.
Chéri-Bibi started to run. The Nut heard him shouting:
"The Pupa! . . . The Pupa!"
He managed to drag himself so far and dropped, at the end of his endurance, before a stream whose cool waters lapped the clear rocks. Chéri-Bibi lay flat with his face in the water drinking . . . drinking. The Nut bent down and drank out of the same cup; and afterwards both slept a dreamless sleep in the shade of the branches which overhung this enchanting stream.
So overcome were they by sleep and exhaustion that they did not hear the approach of four men somewhat noisily descending the bank of the river which they too were longing to reach. When their eyes fell on Chéri-Bibi and the Nut, the four men stopped with one accord. It was the Parisian, the Burglar, the Caid and the Joker.
The delight of the four miscreants, when they saw before them, at their mercy, the two beings whom they most hated in the world, knew no bounds. They were armed with axes which they had seized together with some food—already consumed, however—as they passed through a woodcutting establishment near Kourou.
They had but to lift their arms and strike; and already the Parisian was shaking his ax in the air and staring at the Nut with a look in his eyes in which the craving for murder had already sent the blood. But the Joker who had the coolest head among the gang, agreed with the Burglar, who was the most cunning, that it was a matter that demanded consideration. They dragged the Parisian and the Caid away, and there was a council of war.
The result of the discussion was that the four convicts put off for a while their treacherous attack. The Joker's line of argument was, moreover, entirely convincing. It was no secret, he said, that Chéri-Bibi possessed at some spot in the forest a hiding-place in which he must certainly have taken the precaution, during his earlier expeditions, to collect together such things as provisions and so forth to prevent himself from dying of starvation. From all appearance the two scantily dressed men, who lay overwhelmed with sleep, and defenseless, had not yet reached any of those hiding-places. Would it not be better, before disposing of them, to wait until they themselves had betrayed their hoard to the men who, like the Parisian, the Burglar, the Caid, and the Joker, stood most in need of it?