’I recognised in the voice which was now speaking that of the man of the cottage.

’We owe it to ourselves to put it out of his power to harm us.  Let him sit up, Toussac, for there is no possibility of his escaping.’

Some irresistible force at the back of my neck dragged me instantly into a sitting position, and so for the first time I was able to look round me in a dazed fashion, and to see these men into whose hands I had fallen.  That they were murderers in the past and had murderous plans for the future 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 I had best do with him.’