During the night he had stretched himself out on the platform as before, and after a time he had slept. Through the hours of darkness and silence while each of the whites wrestled with despair, this black man had slept as placidly as a child, with easy, regular breathing. Since then he had resumed his place aft. And so he remained, unchanged, a fixed fact and a growing wonder.
The brutal rage of Perroquet, in which he had vented his distorted hate of the native, had been followed by superstitious doubts.
"Doctor," he said at last, in awed huskiness, "is this a man or a fiend?"
"It is a man."
"A miracle," put in Fenayrou.
But the doctor lifted a finger in a way his pupils would have remembered.
"It is a man," he repeated, "and a very poor and wretched example of a man. You will find no lower type anywhere. Observe his cranial angle, the high ears, the heavy bones of his skull. He is scarcely above the ape. There are educated apes more intelligent."
"Ah? Then what?"
"He has a secret," said the doctor.
That was a word to transfix them.