violence and secret intrigue persisting within this
model criminal laboratory of ours. Do you change vice to virtue by
transporting it half a world away and bottling it up? A disturbing
question. At least if you expect your convicts to work, to aspire, even
to marry and to multiply like free men, you must expect them also to
covet, to scheme, to quarrel and to sin--again like free men. These
facts I had noted without exploring too deeply, you comprehend. But
Bibi-Ri was the last I should have credited with a share in their darker
meaning.

Only picture this client as I had found him. A nimble rogue: a kind of
licensed pest, with a droll face resembling those rubber toys that wink
and grimace between your fingers. True, he had been shipped with the
worst of us. But what of that? One knows these gentlemen the Parisian
police: how they cry a wolf and then go out and nab some stray puppy in
the street. Bibi-Ri! One wondered how he had ever earned his sentence.

And yet--and yet there was certainly something about the fellow. In his
eyes were depths. Something fateful and despairing. Something, in view
of his accustomed mad humor, to make me pitiful and uneasy.

"Look here, my zig," I said. "I have seen too much and not enough. What
have you done? I spy a gay mystery that makes a comedian like you play
such a part."

"Perhaps it is the other part I have to play," he returned, with a gleam
of his proper spirit. "Perhaps I am playing it at the last gasp of
fright--my poor knees clapping like castanets......

"Dumail," he said, "put it this way: Suppose you were within three
counted weeks of your final release from this hell of an island. Your
little red ticket in hand and the actual ship in harbor that presently
should bear you home. Within sight of heaven--you understand. Able to
taste it. Able to count the days still left you like so many bars on a
red-hot gridiron still to be crossed. Three little weeks, Dumail!...
And then your sacred luck offered to trip you up and cheat you again....
Rigolo--what?"

"Very rigolo," I agreed, luring him. "But it seems to me you are
borrowing your effects from the martyrdom of the holy St. Laurent."

"Oh, I have a stranger impersonation than that in my repertoire," he
flashed. "Conceive, if you can, that I am also supposed to fill the role
of a seigneur--and a very noble gentlemen, too--in disguise!"

Perched there on the chair with a dirty towel about his neck, his hair
in a wisp,