United States or Faroe Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But it wasn't difficult to guess; and before Duchemin was finished he had testimony to the rightness of his surmise, finding himself the cynosure of more than a few pair of eyes set in the ill-favoured faces of natives of La Roque. One gathered that the dead guide had enjoyed a fair amount of local popularity.
Of the three last named but one looked Lanyard's way, O'Reilly, and his gaze, resting transiently on the countenance of Andre Duchemin minus the Duchemin beard, passed on without perceptible glimmer of recognition. Why not? Why should it enter his head that one lived and had anticipated his own arrival in New York by twenty hours whom be believed to be buried many fathoms deep off Nantucket?
It was at once apparent that the man had neither knowledge of nor concern with the stranger. For an instant he stood with his back to the latter, peering intently down the aisle which Duchemin had been following, a stout body filling out too well the uniform of a private soldier in the American Expeditionary Forces that most ungainly, inutile, unbecoming costume that ever graced the form of man.
Then Duchemin committed his second error of judgment, which consisted in thinking to find better and cooler air on the heights of the Causse Larzac, across the river, together with a shorter way to Nant indicated on the pocket-map as a by-road running in a tolerably direct line across the plateau than that which followed the windings of the stream.
But when he stopped the man stopped, sat him down upon a rock, filled a pipe, and conspicuously rested. Duchemin gave an impatient gesture and moved on. After another mile he glanced overshoulder again. The same peasant occupied the same relative distance from him.
While he considers the condition grave, in citing case reports of successful treatment by d'Arboval, Duchemin, Leblanc, and others, his conclusion is that many practitioners erroneously consider fractures of the tibia as incurable.
"If mademoiselle would be so good as to tell me something in return ?" "If I can...." "Then why, mademoiselle, did you try my door last night?" "It was neither locked nor bolted on my side. I wished to make sure " "So one fancied. Thank you. Good-night, mademoiselle...?" She was impervious to his hint. "Good-night, Monsieur Duchemin," she said, and closed the door.
"Not yet, though doctor says it may come to that; the poor chap's in a bad way concussion." "So one feared. But monsieur said 'murder'...." Captain Osborne sat forward, steely gaze mercilessly boring into Lanyard's eyes. "Monsieur Duchemin," he said slowly, "Lieutenant Thackeray was not the only passenger to suffer through to-night's villainy. The other died instantly."
Long after noon, sheer fool's luck led him to a hamlet whose mean auberge served him bread and cheese with a wine singularly thin and acid. Here he enquired for a guide, but the one able-bodied man in evidence, a hulking, surly animal, on learning that Duchemin wished to visit Montpellier-le-Vieux, refused with a growl to have anything to do with him.
So Duchemin did nothing to discourage his voluntary shadow; but looking back from time to time, never failed to see that squat, round-shouldered figure in the middle distance of the landscape, following him with the doggedness of Fate. Toward evening, however, of a sudden between two glances the fellow disappeared as completely and mysteriously as if he had fallen or dived into an aven.
Word Of The Day