“And that’s true, m’sieu. It’s hard ground, you know, at Beni-Mora.”
“Yes,” I said, offering him another cigar.
He refused it with a quick gesture.
“She never would say another word as to what the sand-diviner had told her; but she was never the same from that day. She was as uneasy as a lost bitch, m’sieu; and she made me uneasy too. Sometimes she wouldn’t speak to our little one when the child ran to her, and sometimes she’d catch her up, and kiss her till the little one’s cheek was as red as if you’d been striking it. And then one day, after dark, she went.”
“Went!”
“I’d been ill with fever, and gone to spend the night at the sulphur baths; you know, m’sieu, Hammam-Salahkin, under the mountains. I came back just at dawn to open the café. When I got off my mule at the door I heard”—his face twitched convulsively—“the most horrible crying of a child. It was so horrible that I just stood there, holding on to the bridle of the mule, and listening, and didn’t dare go in. I’d heard children cry often enough before; but—mon Dieu!—never like that. At last I dropped the bridle, and went in, with my legs shaking under me. I found the little one alone in the house, and like a mad thing. She’d been alone all night.”
His face set rigidly.
“And her mother knew I should be all night at the Hammam,” he said. “Fin Tireur—yes, it was coming back, and finding my little one left like that in such a place, made me earn the name.”
He fell suddenly into a moody silence. I broke it by saying: “It was the sand-diviner?”
He looked at me sharply. “I don’t know.”