uture I already gathered from what I had heard and seen.
I understood also that in the heart of that lonely marsh I was
absolutely in their power. None the less, I remembered the name that I
bore, and I concealed as far as I could the sickening terror which lay
at my heart.

There were three of them in the room, my former acquaintance and two new
comers. Lesage stood by the table, with his fat brown book in his hand,
looking at me with a composed face, but with that humorous questioning
twinkle in his eyes which a master chess-player might assume when he had
left his opponent without a move. On the top of the box beside him sat
a very ascetic-faced, yellow, hollow-eyed man of fifty, with prim lips
and a shrunken skin, which hung loosely over the long jerking tendons
under his prominent chin. He was dressed in snuff-coloured clothes, and
his legs under his knee-breeches were of a ludicrous thinness. He shook
his head at me with an air of sad wisdom, and I could read little
comfort in his inhuman grey eyes. But it was the man called Toussac who
alarmed me most. He was a colossus; bulky rather than tall, but
misshapen from his excess of muscle. His huge legs were crooked like
those of a great ape; and, indeed, there was something animal about his
whole appearance, something for he was bearded up to his eyes, and it
was a paw rather than a hand which still clutched me by the collar. As
to his expression, he was too thatched with hair to show one, but his
large black eyes looked with a sinister questioning from me to the
others. If they were the judge and jury, it was clear who was to be
executioner.

'Whence did he come? What is his business? How came he to know the
hiding-place?' asked the thin man.

'When he first came I mistook him for you in the darkness,' Lesage
answered. 'You will acknowledge that it was not a night on which one
would expect to meet many people in the salt-marsh. On discovering my
mistake I shut the door and concealed the papers in the chimney. I had
forgotten that he might see me do this through that crack by the hinges,
but when I went out again, to show him his way and so get rid of him, my
eye caught the gap, and I at once realised that he had seen my action,
and that it must have aroused his curiosity to such an extent that it
would be quite certain that he would think and speak of it. I called
him back into the hut, therefore, in order that I might have time to
consider what