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I have not seen many faces in my life for I have spent most of it in the macquis so I remember those I have once met. I knew the Count de Vasselot when he was a young man, and he was what you are now. You are a de Vasselot." "Yes," answered Lory. "I thought so. That is why I followed you from Toulon spending my last sou to do so." He stopped.
A starving man has a grievance against the whole world, and a condemned fratricide is not likely to pick and choose his next victim if tempted by a little money and the chance of escape therewith from the island. It is, moreover, usual for a man to take to the macquis the moment that he finds himself involved in some trouble, or, it may be, merely under suspicion.
"When did you see the Abbe Susini?" asked Lory. "and where if you can tell me that?" "I saw him in the macquis. He often goes up into the mountains alone, dressed like one of us. He is a queer man, that abbe. He says that he sometimes thinks it well to care for the wanderers from his flock a jest, you see." And the man gave his crooked grin again.
The woman looked at the gun, too, and knew the meaning of the raised hammers. She leapt to her feet, and looked round at the sullen faces. "And some of you know who did it," she said; "and you will help the murderer when he goes to the macquis, and take him food, and tell him when the gendarmes are hunting him."
We hear strange stories in the macquis and things that one would never expect to reach the mountains. They say that Colonel Gilbert busies himself in stirring up the Peruccas and the de Vasselots against each other an affair that has slept these thirty years." "Ah!"
And do you know, monsieur, I saw an old man the other day for a moment, in passing on the road, above Asco, who brought my heart into my throat. If he had not been dead this score of years it might have been your father not as I remember him, but as the years would have made him. I was hidden in the trees at the side of the road, and he passed by on foot. He had the air of going into the macquis.
Above, perched on the slope that rises abruptly on the left-hand side of the road, the village of Oletta looks out over the plain towards St. Florent and the sea a few brown houses of dusky stone, with roofs of stone; a square-towered church, built just where the cultivation ceases and the rocks and the macquis begin.
"I have heard nothing, my friend, but cannon. I am from Sedan to-day." The man seemed to hesitate. He turned uneasily in his chair, glanced this way and that among the trees a habit acquired in the macquis, no doubt. He took off his hat and passed his hand pensively over his hair. Then he turned to Lory.
He paused and looked round him with the slow and distant glance which any may perceive in the eyes of a caged wild beast. "They are all down from the mountains," he said. Even the Abbe Susini glanced uneasily over his shoulder. These still, stony valleys were peopled by the noiseless, predatory Ishmaels of the macquis.
In the macquis, as in better society, there are grades of evil. Some are hiding from their own pride, others are evading a lifelong sentence, while many know that if the gendarme sees them he will shoot at sight running, standing, sleeping, as a keeper kills vermin. It is commonly asserted that these bandits are not dangerous, that they have no grievance against travellers.
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