h a woman turned from tending the kettle to overlook us
steadily. She was alone, but my faith! she had no need to fear. Figure
to yourself this massive sibyl with a face planned on a mason's square,
deep-chiselled and brooding in the flush of firelight. She was like
that. Yes, a sibyl in her cave, to whom Bibi-Ri entered gingerly as a
cat.

"I am here, Mother Carron," he said.

Then for sure and for the first time I saw where we stood. Mother
Carron! In Noumea--through all the obscure complex of convict life--no
name bore more significance: or less, in the official sense. For she had
no number. Consider what that means to a community of jailbirds. The
finger of the law had never touched her. Consider how singular in a
country of keepers and felons!

She was a free colonist. Her husband, a distinguished housebreaker, had
been transported some years before. Whereupon she had had the
hardihood--sufficient if you like!--to immigrate, to claim a concession
and to have that same husband assigned her as a convict laborer.

Since then she had wielded a curious power. Her size, her tongue, her
knowledge of crime and criminals and her contempt of them all--these
made her formidable. But also it was whispered that queer things went on
at her plantation under the flamboyant trees: a famous rendezvous where
no prying agent ever found a shred of evidence--against her or any one
else. Successful escapes had been decided there, they said. And
disputes of convict factions that troubled no other court, and even
politics of the underworld at home, referred to certain great ones among
us. Our inner conclave of transportes--so dread and secret that to be
identified a member brings solitary confinement in the black cells--had
assembled there to seek her counsel. Had demurred to it and been routed
with her broom whisking about their ears, if rumor spoke true. For she
was a lady of weighty ways.

Me, I was glad to slip aside unchallenged. I had no desire to linger
between that dame and the purpose, whatever it might be, that dwelt in
the fixity of her frown. As a spectator I blotted myself in the shadows,
to attend the next act of this hidden and somber drama.

"Monsieur," she began, with an affectation wholly foreign to her rough
voice, "I have the felicity to inform you that our beloved Zelie is home
from Fonwhary again."

"I knew it," murmured Bibi-Ri.

"She resides at present under this poor roof."

He cast a nervous glance towa