"Oui, c'est moi, M'sieu'," replied that smirking gentleman, with a demureness that struck Warner as horrible.
"But why?" he asked, in frank amazement.
"Ah," rejoined Asticot complacently, "that is the question, M'sieu'. I myself do not know exactly why I am here."
But he knew well enough. First of all, he had gotten all over any terror of bullets in Africa. Five years and fifty skirmishes had blunted that sort of fear in him.
What he wanted to do was to see what was going on. More than that, the encounter with One Eye in Ausone had strangely moved this rat of the Faubourgs. He desired to find that Disciplinary Battalion again—the Battalion which had been for him a hell on earth—but he wanted to look at it, pushed by a morbid curiosity. If One Eye were there, perhaps other old friends might still decorate those fierce and sullen ranks.
There was a certain lieutenant, too—gladly he would shoot him in the back if opportunity offered. He had dreamed for months of doing this.
But there was still another reason that incited Asticot to offer his services to Sister Félicité as a bearer. The ambulance had been called to the Ausone Forest. Somewhere within those leafy shades lurked Wildresse.
Never before had such a hatred blazed in the crippled intellect of Asticot as the red rage that flared within him when he learned that he had been employed by a spy who had sold out France.
Anything else he could have understood, any other crime. He was not squeamish; nothing appalled him in the category of villainy except only this one thing. Scoundrel as he was, he could not have found it in his heart to sell his country. And to remember that he had been employed by a man who did sell France aroused within him a passion for revenge so fierce that only a grip on the throat of Wildresse could ever satisfy the craving that made his vision red as blood.
He wore a brassard, this voyou of the Paris gutters, set with the Geneva cross. And in his pocket was an automatic pistol.