The Lizard turned his glowing eyes on me.
“Was the man’s name—Mornac?” I asked, at a hopeless venture.
The Lizard shivered; I needed no reply, not even his hoarse, “Are you the devil, that you know all things?”
I looked at him wonderingly. What wrong could Mornac have done a ragged outcast here on the Breton coast? And where was Mornac? Had he left Paris in time to avoid the Prussian trap? Was he here in this country, rubbing elbows with Buckhurst?
“Did Tric-Trac tell you that Mornac was at the head of that band?” I demanded.
“Why do you ask me?” stammered the Lizard; “you know everything—even when it is scarcely whispered!”
The superstitious astonishment of the man, his utter collapse and his evident fear of me, did not suit me. Treachery comes through that kind of fear; I meant to rule him in another and safer manner. I meant to be absolutely honest with him.
It was difficult to persuade him that I had only guessed 252 the name whispered; that, naturally, I should think of Mornac as a high officer of police, and particularly so since I knew him to be a villain, and had also divined his relations with Buckhurst.
I drew from the poacher that Tric-Trac had named Mornac as head of the communistic plot in Brittany; that Mornac was coming to Paradise very soon, and that then something gay might be looked for.
And that night I took Speed into my confidence and finally Kelly Eyre, our balloonist.