“You say he bribed you?” asked Buckhurst, gently.
“Yes; I’ve said it twenty times, haven’t I?”
“And you took the bribes?”
“Parbleu!”
“And you thought if you admitted it and denounced the man who bribed you that you would help divide a few millions with us, you rogue?” suggested Buckhurst, admiringly.
The wretch laughed outright.
“And you believe that you deserve well of the commune?” smiled Buckhurst.
The soldier grinned and opened his mouth to answer, and Buckhurst shot him through the face; and, as he fell, shot him again, standing wreathed in the smoke of his own weapon.
The deafening racket of the revolver, the smoke, the spectacle of the dusty, inert thing on the floor over which Buckhurst stood and shot, seemed to stun us all.
“I think,” said Buckhurst, in a pleasantly persuasive voice, “that there will be no more bribery in this battalion.” He deliberately opened the smoking weapon; the spent shells dropped one by one from the cylinder, clinking on the stone floor.