d the water within the hold. Convulsively he clutched it, wound it
about one arm, and bade them haul.

Thus they dragged him out and aboard their own craft, and put him ashore
at the nearest point willing out of humanity to do so much, but daring
to do no more when he had told them how he came where they had found
him.

Half naked, numbed through and through, with chattering teeth and
failing limbs, Leroy staggered into the guard-house at Chantenay.
Soldiers of the Blues stripped him of his sodden rags, wrapped him in a
blanket, thawed him outwardly before a fire and inwardly with gruel, and
then invited him to give an account of himself.

The story of the horse will have led you to suppose him a ready liar.
He drew now upon that gift of his, represented himself as a mariner
from Montoir, and told a harrowing tale of shipwreck. Unfortunately, he
overdid it. There was present a fellow who knew something of the sea,
and something of Montoir, to whom Leroy's tale did not ring quite true.
To rid themselves of responsibility, the soldiers carried him before the
Revolutionary Committee of Nantes.

Even here all might have gone well with him, since there was no member
of that body with seacraft to penetrate his imposture. But as
ill-chance would have it, one of the members sitting that day was the
black-mustached sans-culotte Jolly, the very man who had dragged Leroy
out of his cell last night and tied him up.

At sight of him Jolly's eyes bulged in his head.

"Where the devil have you come from?" he greeted him thunderously.

Leroy quailed. Jolly's associates stared. But Jolly explained to them:

"He was of last night's bathing party. And he has the impudence to come
before us like this. Take him away and shove him back into the water."

But Bachelier, a man who, next to the President Goullin, exerted the
greatest influence in the committee, was gifted with a sense of humour
worthy of the Revolution. He went off into peals of laughter as he
surveyed the crestfallen cocassier, and, perhaps because Leroy's
situation amused him, he was disposed to be humane.

"No, no!" he said. "Take him back to Le Bouffay for the present. Let the
Tribunal deal with him."

So back to Le Bouffay went Leroy, back to his dungeon, his fetid straw
and his bread and water, there to be forgotten again, as he had been
forgotten before, until Fate should need him.

It is to him that we owe most of the materials from which we are able
to rec