e of deviltry. Fenayrou himself had
been condemned "to perpetuity" as an incorrigible.

"Is not our doctor a wonder?" he inquired as he handed a cigarette along
to the third white man. "He thinks of everything. You should be ashamed
to grumble. See--we are free, after all. Free!"

The third was a gross, pock-marked man with hairless lids known
sometimes as Niniche, Trois Huit, Le Tordeur, but chiefly among copains
as Perroquet--a name derived perhaps from his beaked nose, or from some
perception of his jailbird character. He was a garroter by profession,
accustomed to rely upon his fists only for the exchange of amenities.
Dubosc might indulge a fancy and Fenayrou seek to carry it as a pose,
but The Parrot remained a gentleman of strictly serious turn. There is
perhaps a tribute to the practical spirit of penal administration in the
fact that while Dubosc was the most dangerous of these three and
Fenayrou the most depraved, Perroquet was the one with the official
reputation, whose escape would be signaled first among the "Wanted." He
accepted the cigarette because he was glad to get it, but he said
nothing until Dubosc passed a tin box of matches and the first gulp of
picadura filled his lungs....

"Wait till you've got your two feet on a pave, my boy. That will be the
time to talk of freedom. What? Suppose there came a storm."

"It is not the season of storms," observed Dubosc.

But The Parrot's word had given them a check. Such spirits as these, to
whom the land had been a horror, would be slow to feel the terror of the
sea. Back there they had left the festering limbo of a convict colony,
oblivion. Out here they had reached the rosy threshold of the big round
world again. They were men raised from the dead, charged with all the
furious appetites of lost years, with the savor of life strong and sweet
on their lips. And yet they paused and looked about in quickened
perception, with the clutch at the throat that takes the landsman on big
waters. The spaces were so wide and empty. The voices in their ears were
so strange and murmurous. There was a threat in each wave that came from
the depths, a sinister vibration. None of them knew the sea. None knew
its ways, what tricks it might play, what traps it might spread--more
deadly than those of the jungle.

The raft was running now before a brisk chop with alternate spring and
wallow, while the froth bubbled in over the prow and ran down among
them as they sat. "Where