The name meant nothing. Laguerre's life was black; many Floréals had figured in it.
"You do not remember me?"
"N-no, and yet—"
"Perhaps you will remember another—a woman. She had a scar, just here." The speaker laid a tobacco-stained finger upon his left cheek-bone, and Laguerre noticed for the first time that the wrist beneath it was maimed as from a burn. "It was a little scar and it was brown, in the candle-light. She was young and round and her body was soft—" The mulatto's lean face was suddenly distorted in a horrible grimace which he intended for a smile. "She was my wife, Laguerre, by the Church, and you took her. She died, but she had a child—your child."
The huge black figure shrank into its green-and-gold panoply, the bloodshot eyes rested upon Inocencio with a look of terrified recognition.
"I have no children, Laguerre; no wife; no home! I am poor and you have become great. There was an old man whom you stretched by the wrists, in the moonlight. Do you remember him? And the old woman, my mother, whom one of your soldiers shot? Maximilien did it, but I killed him and Congo! And now there is only you."
"That was—long ago." The prisoner rolled his eyes desperately; his voice was uncertain as he whined, "I am rich—richer than anybody knows."
"Others had more money than we, eh?"
The general nodded.
"Pierrine is dead, and you would have been the President. It is well that I came in time." Again Captain Ruiz smiled, and the corpulent soldier was shaken loosely as by an invisible hand. "Come now! Your friends are approaching and I must prepare you to greet them."