At the word apaches the girl turned on him with teeth bared as though in a snarl. But at the sound of Rufin's voice she subsided.
"What is his name—quickly?" he demanded.
"Giaconi," she answered.
Rufin looked his question at the little official, who turned to the girl.
"Peter the Lucky?" he queried.
She nodded dejectedly.
The little official made a grimace. "It was he," he said, "who did the throat-cutting. Tiens! this begins to be a drama."
The girl, with drooping head, made a faint moan of protest and misery. Rufin signed the little man to be silent. The truth, if he had but given it entertainment, had offered itself to him from the first. All he had heard of the man, Papa Musard's slanderous-sounding complaints of him, the fat concierge's reports of his violence, had gathered towards this culmination. He had insisted upon thinking of him as a full-blooded man of genius, riotously making little of conventions, a creature abounding in life, tinctured a little, perhaps, with the madness that may spice the mind of a visionary and enrage his appetites. It was a figure ha had created to satisfy himself.
"It was false art," he reflected. "That is me—false art!"
Still, whatever he had seen wrongly, there was still the picture. Apache, murderer, and all the rest—the fellow had painted the picture. No one verdict can account for both art and morals, and there was reason to fear, it seemed, that the law which executed a murderer would murder a painter at the same time—and such a painter!