“Ay,” said the young man; “they were coming to set him free just when he had killed himself. What bad luck!”
“Only innocent souls can be thus worked on by their imagination,” said Jacques Collin. “For, observe, he was the loser by the theft.”
“How much money was it?” asked Fil-de-Soie, the deep and cunning.
“Seven hundred and fifty thousand francs,” said Jacques Collin blandly.
The three convicts looked at each other and withdrew from the group that had gathered round the sham priest.
“He screwed the moll’s place himself!” said Fil-de-Soie in a whisper to le Biffon, “and they want to put us in a blue funk for our cartwheels” (thunes de balles, five-franc pieces).
“He will always be the boss of the swells,” replied la Pouraille. “Our pieces are safe enough.”
La Pouraille, wishing to find some man he could trust, had an interest in considering Jacques Collin an honest man. And in prison, of all places, a man believes what he hopes.
“I lay you anything, he will come round the big Boss and save his chum!” said Fil-de-Soie.
“If he does that,” said le Biffon, “though I don’t believe he is really God, he must certainly have smoked a pipe with old Scratch, as they say.”