He was standing with his hands in his pockets, whistling a gay air and awaiting me. I was toiling up the steep path, and felt almost dead beat. The whole mountain was a mass of gigantic rocks, half buried in the sand, soft and moist from recently melted snow and the draining of the ice.
“I was looking for a franc-piece I dropped. It rolled behind that stone, and I cannot find it,” he said. Then he looked into my eyes, and asked, with an insolent air, “Don’t you believe me?”
“No.”
I did not believe him, and began to be greatly disquieted. He perceived it, and immediately became jovial and talkative. He knew me, he said—he had asked the innkeeper about me. He knew that I was a journalist; it must be a fine trade for making money by the sackful. He knew city life, for he had lived in Turin, and he always read the Secolo—it was his favourite paper. He also knew that I had written novels—another gold mine. Writers of romance, he supposed, were always seeking adventure, and poking their noses in out-of-the-way corners, and inquiring into other people’s business. Good! I was with him, and might meet with a strange experience presently.
But I paid no attention to him.
“You gentlemen come to the Alps for the fun of knowing what fatigue is,” he said. “Ah! if you only knew what it was—how much a piece of bread costs!”
He was eloquent and excitable, and spoke like a man believing himself to be followed by constant persecution.
We had almost reached the summit, when suddenly we came upon a rough pillar built of pieces of rock piled together.
“See!” he said; “there is the frontier mark.”
Then we continued walking a dozen paces or so, and were in France.