“I’d go! I’d go!”
The shrill cry went up to the setting sun. But no one answered, and nothing darkened the arid whiteness of the road that wound across the plain and passed before the inn-door.
2
Night had fallen when the two sportsmen rode in on mules, tired and hungry. Hadj came from his keef to take the beasts, Madame Lemaire from her kitchen to ask if there were any birds for her to cook. Her husband gave her a string of them, and she turned away from him without a word, and went back into the house.
There was nothing odd in this, but something in his wife’s face, seen only for a moment in the darkness of the court, had startled Lemaire, and he looked after her as if he were inclined to call her back; then said to his companion, Jacques Bouvier:
“Did you see Marie?”
“Yes. She looks as if she had just stumbled over a jackal,” and he laughed.
Lemaire stood for a minute where he was. Then he shouted to Hadj:
“Hadj! A—Hadj!”
The one-eyed keef-smoker came.