“That’s what I feared,” muttered the officer. “Ya-Bon has only his right hand; but, when that hand holds any one by the throat, it’s a miracle if it doesn’t strangle him. The Boches know something about it.”
Ya-Bon was a sort of colossus, the color of gleaming coal, with a woolly head and a few curly hairs on his chin, with an empty sleeve fastened to his left shoulder and two medals pinned to his jacket. Ya-Bon had had one cheek, one side of his jaw, half his mouth and the whole of his palate smashed by a splinter of shell. The other half of that mouth was split to the ear in a laugh which never seemed to cease and which was all the more surprising because the wounded portion of the face, patched up as best it could be and covered with a grafted skin, remained impassive.
Moreover, Ya-Bon had lost his power of speech. The most that he could do was to emit a sequence of indistinct grunts in which his nickname of Ya-Bon was everlastingly repeated.
He uttered it once more with a satisfied air, glancing by turns at his master and his victim, like a good sporting-dog standing over the bird which he has retrieved.
“Good,” said the officer. “But, next time, go to work more gently.”
He bent over the man, felt his heart and, on seeing that he had only fainted, asked the nurse:
“Do you know him?”
“No,” she said.
“Are you sure? Have you never seen that head anywhere?”
It was a very big head, with black hair, plastered down with grease, and a thick beard. The man’s clothes, which were of dark-blue serge and well-cut, showed him to be in easy circumstances.