“Only innocent souls can be thus worked on by their imagination,” said Jacques Collin.  “For, observe, he was the loser by the theft.”

“How much money was it?” asked Fil-de-Soie, the deep and cunning.

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand francs,” said Jacques Collin blandly.

The three convicts looked at each other and withdrew from the group that had gathered round the sham priest.

“He screwed the moll’s place himself!” said Fil-de-Soie in a whisper to le Biffon, “and they want to put us in a blue funk for our cartwheels” (thunes de balles, five-franc pieces).

“He will always be the boss of the swells,” replied la Pouraille.  “Our pieces are safe enough.”

La Pouraille, wishing to find some man he could trust, had an interest in considering Jacques Collin an honest man.  And in prison, of all places, a man believes what he hopes.

“I lay you anything, he will come round the big Boss and save his chum!” said Fil-de-Soie.

“If he does that,” said le Biffon, “though I don’t believe he is really God, he must certainly have smoked a pipe with old Scratch, as they say.”

“Didn’t you hear him say, ’Old Scratch has cut me’?” said Fil-de-Soie.

“Oh!” cried la Pouraille, “if only he would save my nut, what a time I would have with my whack of the shiners and the yellow boys I have stowed.”

“Do what he bids you!” said Fil-de Soie.

“You don’t say so?” retorted la Pouraille, looking at his pal.

“What a flat you are!  You will be booked for the Abbaye!” said le Biffon.  “You have no other door to budge, if you want to keep on your pins, to yam, wet your whistle, and fake to the end; you must take his orders.”

“That’s all right,” said la Pouraille.  “There is not one of us that will blow the gaff, or if he does, I will take him where I am going——­”

“And he’ll do it too,” cried Fil-de-Soie.

The least sympathetic reader, who has no pity for this strange race, may conceive of the state of mind of Jacques Collin, finding himself between the dead body of the idol whom he had been bewailing during five hours that night, and the imminent end of his former comrade—­the dead body of Theodore, the young Corsican.  Only to see the boy would demand extraordinary cleverness; to save him would need a miracle; but he was thinking of it.

For the better comprehension of what Jacques Collin proposed to attempt, it must be remarked that murderers and thieves, all the men who people the galleys, are not so formidable as is generally supposed.  With a few rare exceptions these creatures are all cowards, in consequence no doubt, of the constant alarms which weigh on their spirit.  The faculties being perpetually on the stretch in thieving, and the success of a stroke of business depending on the exertion of every vital force, with a readiness of wit to match their dexterity of hand, and an alertness which exhausts the nervous system; these violent exertions of will once over, they become stupid, just as a singer or a dancer drops quite exhausted after a fatiguing pas seul, or one of those tremendous duets which modern composers inflict on the public.