Like a jack on wires Bibi-Ri sprang to his feet.
"True!" he laughed, shrill. "You are right, Dumail. You are the friend in need!... Where is that blessed mop, to dry my face at least. So! I'm off!... But to-night—what? I owe you something, Dumail: you and your curiosity! To-night you shall come behind the scenes. If you dare. Understood?" He wheeled at the step: his eyes held their old twinkling deviltry. "I was a thief before I was ever a gentleman," he said, with his weird grin, "and I can still play that farce to its end—get through and done with it and pull out once for all!... You shall see for yourself!"
Thereupon he left me to the haze of bewilderment in which I lived for the rest of the day.
Now you can imagine without much telling that we have ways—we convicts assigned here and there on service—to conduct our own underground affairs in despite authority. Unnecessary to explain these little evasions. Enough to say my client was as good as his word that evening. Enough to say that under misty stars, while the military of the watch were safely watching, Bibi-Ri crept out of town by forbidden paths: and that I crept along with him.
Inland from Nouméa for a wide district is all one checkerboard of gardens and small estates where libérés and convict proprietors—the aristocrats of our settlement—enjoy their snug retreat. Not being a reformed bandit myself, skilled in agriculture and piety, I was strange to this countryside. But Bibi-Ri had the key. I could only tag at his heels through blind plantations and admire his silence and his speed. Truly, as he said, he was taking me behind the scenes: until at last, in a grove of flamboyants that wrapped the night with darker webbing, he set hand to a door.
For all I knew it could have opened on the Pit itself: but a shaft of light guided me stumbling into a stone-flagged kitchen, low and dim and smoky in fact as some lesser inferno.
By the hearth a woman turned from tending the kettle to overlook us steadily. She was alone, but my faith! she had no need to fear. Figure to yourself this massive sibyl with a face planned on a mason's square, deep-chiselled and brooding in the flush of firelight. She was like that. Yes, a sibyl in her cave, to whom Bibi-Ri entered gingerly as a cat.
"I am here, Mother Carron," he said.
Then for sure and for the first time I saw where we stood. Mother Carron! In Nouméa—through all the obscure complex of convict life—no name bore more significance: or less, in the official sense. For she had no number. Consider what that means to a community of jailbirds. The finger of the law had never touched her. Consider how singular in a country of keepers and felons!
She was a free colonist. Her husband, a distinguished housebreaker, had been transported some years before. Whereupon she had had the hardihood—sufficient if you like!—to immigrate, to claim a concession and to have that same husband assigned her as a convict laborer.