I started and looked round. The speaker was Captain Ludwig, who, with two of his fellows, had come up behind me while I mused. Something in his tone rather than his words--a note of menace--warned me to be careful; while the glum looks of his companions, as they glanced from me to the dead man, added point to the hint, and filled my mind with a sudden sense of danger. I had learned more than I had been intended to learn; I had found out something I had not been intended to find out. The very quietness and sunshine and the solitude of the place added horror to the moment. It was all I could do to hide my discomfiture and face them without flinching.
'My thoughts?' I said, forcing a grin. 'They were not very difficult to guess. A sharp shrift, and a short rope? What else should a man think here?'
'Ay?' Ludwig said, watching me closely with his eyes half closed and his lips parted.
He would say no more, and I was forced to go on. 'It is not the first time I have seen a man dancing on nothing!' I said recklessly; 'but it gave me a turn.'
He kicked the placard. 'You are a scholar,' he said. 'What is this?'
My face grew hot. I dared not deny my learning, for I did not know how much he knew; but, for the nonce, I wished heartily that I had never been taught to read.
'That?' I said, affecting a jovial tone to cover my momentary hesitation. 'A seasonable warning. They are as thick here as nuts in autumn. We could spare a few more, for the matter of that.'
'Ay, but this one?' he retorted, coolly tapping the dead man with a little stick he carried, and then turning to look me in the face. 'You have seen him before.'
I made a great show of staring at the body, but I suppose I played my part ill, for before I could speak Ludwig broke in with a brutal laugh.
'Chut, man!' he said, with a sneer of contempt; 'you know him; I see you do. And knew him all along. Well, if fools will poke their noses into things that do not concern them, it is not my affair. I must trouble you for your company awhile.'