"I will send him to the Central Prison if he has been bringing us false news—and of course he has. What a blessing! I have a committal form with me."
I did not shrink from the test, and while Keller Bey maintained the cobbler-magistrate in some degree of quiet on the other side of the platform, the expert deserter quickly got his eye on the signalling apparatus.
"I have it," he cried, his brow glued to the eyepiece and his hand signalling for stillness. "Oh, do be quiet!"
Raoux's dancing feet were shaking the crazy platform.
"The devil is in the fellow's legs," said Keller Bey. "Will you be quiet, Raoux, or shall I drop you over to the glory of your patron saint?"
He held him for a moment asprawl over the edge with a drop of two hundred feet clear upon the packed causeway stones. Something of helplessness in the grip of Keller Bey for a moment took the madness out of Raoux.
He kept fairly still when Keller placed him again on the floor of the platform, and with a pair of huge hands, one on each shoulder, held him in place. Without taking his eyes from the spyglass the engineer searched and found a dirty note-book to which was attached by a string a stump of pencil. Presently he began to spell out a message from one side of the river to the other. I could see his fingers shaking with excitement as he jotted down the letters.
"Why," he exclaimed at the first pause, "it's our fellows from Avignon, and they are not even troubling to code the message—shows what they think of us."
"Tell us what they say," said Keller Bey.
"One moment—they are beginning again," and the pencil stub began to travel.