Father Anselm."

"Not Father Anselm?... Imbecile! Of course it is!"

"It is not Father Anselm."

"Who then--vaurien?"

"It is the fat priest from La Foa."

Impossible to doubt his steadfast whispering.

"La Foa!" she echoed, stricken. "You say? Not truly!... La Foa?"

"I saw him."

"And another? What other?"

"We think he is Bombiste."

I can swear that wretched individual never in his black past had handled
a bomb with half the effect his mere nickname produced among us there.

"Bombiste! The executioner's assistant?... From Ile de Nou?... Here?"

"They are at the gate."

"Thunder of God!... And above all, at this time!" She caught his arm.
"Delay that priest! Any way and anyhow: hold him!... Confess to him, if
nothing else will do--Heaven knows you need it!... And let the other
through at once. Be quick!"

She banished him like a puff of smoke and we waited in drawn
suspense--we four--our eyes on the archway through which this visitant
must now appear.

"What can he want?" demanded Mother Carron. "That blood-stained basket
robber!"

And Zelie answered her very quietly.

"I suppose he brings me my message from M. de Nou."

You will remember in all my term at Noumea I had seen but once before
this ignoble under-servant of the guillotine. I could have preferred
never to see him again. He did not improve on closer view.

He was one of those creatures somehow resembling insects: like the
ciliate and noxious things that run about when you lift a damp rock. You
know?... Very black. Very hairy, with hair overlaid in fringes curiously
soft and glistening. With eyes very small, round and quick as beads. In
person he was misshapen: bandy-legged: but with all that a powerful
ruffian, whose long, crooked arms might have ended in nippers like a
scorpion's.

There you have the fellow Bombiste, who presently slid in at the doorway
and stood blinking through the light.

We regarded this type: and he us. Did I tell you he called himself a
Pole? I cannot say. But certainly his speech was hardly to be
comprehended. He spat something that could have passed equally for a
greeting or a curse. And so far he had the advantage of us: for any
reply of ours would have been only the half of that.

To do her justice Mother Carron kept a bold front to him. But she was
handling here a very different sort of brute--not to be reached by that
singular influence she exerted on the convict community at large:
himself an out