“Go on,” I motioned to the poacher. “How did you get the money?”
“Oh, pour ça—in my turn I turned sonneur,” he replied, with a savage smile.
A sonneur, in thieves’ slang, is a creature of the footpad type who, tripping his victim flat, seizes him by the shoulders and beats his head against the pavement until he renders him unconscious—if he doesn’t kill him.
“It was pay-day,” continued the Lizard. “Buckhurst opened the box and I heard him—he hammered it open with a cold chisel. I was standing guard on the forest’s edge; I crept back, hearing the hammering and the little bell ringing the Angelus of Tric-Trac. It was close to dusk; by the time he got into the box it was dark in the woods, and it was easy to jump on his back and strike—not very hard, m’sieu—but, I tell you, Buckhurst lay for two days with eyes like a sick owl’s! He knew one of his own men had done it. He never said a word, but I know he thinks it was Tric-Trac.... And when he is ready—bon soir, Tric-Trac!”
He drew his right hand across his corded throat with a horridly suggestive motion. Speed watched him narrowly.
I asked the poacher why Buckhurst had come to Paradise, and why his banditti had seized the railroad at Rose-Sainte-Anne. 336
“Ah,” cried the Lizard, with a ferocious leer, “that is the kernel under the limpet’s tent! And I have uncovered it—I, Robert Garenne, bon sang de Jésu!”
He stretched out his powerful arm toward the sea. “Where is that cruiser, m’sieu? Gone? Yes, but who sent her off? Buckhurst, with his new signal-book! Where? In chase of a sea-swallow, or a frigate (bird). Who knows? Listen, messieurs! We are to wreck the train for Brest to-night. Do you comprehend?”
“Where?” I asked, quietly.
“Just where the trestle at Lammerin crosses the ravine below the house of Josephine Tanguy.”