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Hereupon I suggested that the v-f-g carry part of one of my bundles with me, and received the answer: "I am doing too much for you as it is. No gendarme is supposed to carry a prisoner's baggage." I said then: "I'm too tired." He responded: "You can leave here anything you don't care to carry further; I'll take care of it." I looked at the gendarme. I looked several blocks through him.
This haughty inaccuracy produced an astonishing effect, namely, the prestidigitatorial vanishment of the v-f-g. The v-f-g's numerous confreres looked scared and twirled their whiskers. I sat on the curb and began to fill a paper with something which I found in my pockets, certainly not tobacco.
Escorted to bureau, where I am turned over to a very fat gendarme. "This is the American." The v-f-g eyed me, and I read my sins in his porklike orbs. "Hurry, we have to walk," he ventured sullenly and commandingly. Himself stooped puffingly to pick up the segregated sack.
The pigs on my either hand had by this time overcome their respective inertias and were chomping cheek-murdering chunks. They had quite a layout, a regular picnic-lunch elaborate enough for kings or even presidents. The v-f-g in particular annoyed me by uttering alternate chompings and belchings.
They reminded me of ... never mind. "If you have change," said he, "you might hire this kid to carry some of your baggage." Then he lit a pipe which was made in his own image, and smiled fattily. But herein the v-f-g had bust his milk-jug. There is a slit of a pocket made in the uniform of his criminal on the right side, and completely covered by the belt which his criminal always wears.
His criminal had thus outwitted the gumshoe fraternity. A strongly-built, groomed apache smelling of cologne and onions greeted my v-f-g with that affection which is peculiar to gendarmes. On me he stared cynically, then sneered frankly. With a little tooty shriek the funny train tottered in. My captors had taken pains to place themselves at the wrong end of the platform.
And I placed my bed, bed-roll, blankets and ample pelisse under one arm, my 150-odd pound duffle-bag under the other; then I paused. Then I said, "Where's my cane?" The v-f-g hereat had a sort of fit, which perfectly became him. I repeated gently: "When I came to the bureau I had a cane."
Splutter-splutter-fizz-Poop the v-f-g is back, with my oak-branch in his raised hand, slithering opprobria and mostly crying: "Is that huge piece of wood what you call a cane? It is, is it? What? How? What the ," so on. I beamed upon him and thanked him, and explained that a "dirty Frenchman" had given it to me as a souvenir, and that I would now proceed.
With a grunt of satisfaction the brigand stuffed it in a large pouch, taking pains that it should not show. Silently the divine eyes said to mine: "What can we do, we criminals?" And we smiled at each other for the last time, the eyes and my eyes. A station. The apache descends. I follow with my numerous affaires. The divine man follows me the v-f-g him.
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