commanded. "Have you killed any one?"

"No!"

"Is there another sentence hanging over you? Have you some stain on your
prison record?"

"None."

"Whom have you wronged?"

"Nobody."

"Then sacred pig! It is only a folly of nerves after all! Just because
you expect to cash your millions and swim in champagne at last?... Bear
up under it, my boy. Stiffen your lip! Faith, you might be a missing
dauphin or even the Red Mark himself--as people say--and still you could
meet your luck with a little courage!"

Like a jack on wires Bibi-Ri sprang to his feet.

"True!" he laughed, shrill. "You are right, Dumail. You are the friend
in need!... Where is that blessed mop, to dry my face at least. So! I'm
off!... But to-night--what? I owe you something, Dumail: you and your
curiosity! To-night you shall come behind the scenes. If you dare.
Understood?" He wheeled at the step: his eyes held their old twinkling
deviltry. "I was a thief before I was ever a gentleman," he said, with
his weird grin, "and I can still play that farce to its end--get through
and done with it and pull out once for all!... You shall see for
yourself!"

Thereupon he left me to the haze of bewilderment in which I lived for
the rest of the day.

Now you can imagine without much telling that we have ways--we convicts
assigned here and there on service--to conduct our own underground
affairs in despite authority. Unnecessary to explain these little
evasions. Enough to say my client was as good as his word that evening.
Enough to say that under misty stars, while the military of the watch
were safely watching, Bibi-Ri crept out of town by forbidden paths: and
that I crept along with him.

Inland from Noumea for a wide district is all one checkerboard of
gardens and small estates where liberes and convict proprietors--the
aristocrats of our settlement--enjoy their snug retreat. Not being a
reformed bandit myself, skilled in agriculture and piety, I was strange
to this countryside. But Bibi-Ri had the key. I could only tag at his
heels through blind plantations and admire his silence and his speed.
Truly, as he said, he was taking me behind the scenes: until at last, in
a grove of flamboyants that wrapped the night with darker webbing, he
set hand to a door.

For all I knew it could have opened on the Pit itself: but a shaft of
light guided me stumbling into a stone-flagged kitchen, low and dim and
smoky in fact as some lesser inferno.

By the heart