Offering him one, I answered, "It is not very hard to guess. At this hour, when one has made six leagues in the Canigou, supper is the great thing after all."
"Yes, but to-morrow? Here I wager that you have come to Ille to see the idol. I guessed that when I saw you draw the portraits of the saints at Serrabona."
"The idol! what idol?" This word had aroused my curiosity.
"What! were you not told at Perpignan how M. de Peyrehorade had found an idol in the earth?"
"You mean to say an earthen statue?"
"Not at all. A statue in copper, and there is enough of it to make a lot of big pennies. She weighs as much as a church-bell. It was deep in the ground at the foot of an olive-tree that we got her."
"You were present at the discovery?"
"Yes, sir. Two weeks ago M. de Peyrehorade told Jean Coll and me to uproot an old olive-tree which was frozen last year when the weather, as you know, was very severe. So in working, Jean Coll, who went at it with all his might, gave a blow with his pickax, and I heard bimm—as if he had struck a bell—and I said, 'What is that?' We dug on and on, and there was a black hand, which looked like the hand of a corpse, sticking out of the earth. I was scared to death. I ran to M. de Peyrehorade and I said to him: 'There are dead people, master, under the olive-tree! The priest must be called.'
"'What dead people?' said he to me. He came, and he had no sooner seen the hand than he cried out, 'An antique! an antique!' You would have thought he had found a treasure. And there he was with the pickax in his own hands, struggling and doing almost as much work as we two."
"And at last what did you find?"