-" began the doctor.

"Twixt East and West," suggested the inspector.

"Quite so. And if you doubt my word for it--look!"...

He lifted aside the narrow-edged coat to show the naked, rugged breast
beneath; and there, a little to the left, within a space that might have
been covered with a lotus leaf were three smooth, round bullet holes
where the late headman of Apyodaw had been drilled through the
heart--three times.

THE RED MARK

Even now nobody can tell his name, though doubtless it was a grand and a
proud one. Perhaps you could find it in the files of the Bordeaux press
twenty years ago, when they sentenced him to transportation for life for
five proved murders. Since then it has been officially forgotten. But
the man himself has lived on. He lives and he continues to develop his
capabilities--as we are all expected to do here in New Caledonia.

M. de Nou, we call him. He is our only convict official. Ordinarily, you
comprehend, our jailers do not admit convicts to the administration. We
are citizens, if you like, in this criminal commonwealth. We are the
populace of this outlaw colony at the far navel of the earth. We are
artisans, workmen, domestics: we are masons, cooks, farmers: we are even
landholders and concessionaires--enjoying the high privilege of forced
labor, the lofty civic title of cattle in a bull-pen. It is all very
philanthropic: but we have not yet risen to fill posts under the
government. Except one of us. He has been raised because they could find
no other, convict or free, to perform the peculiar duties of the
position. That is M. de Nou. We hate him. There is not a creature of us
from Balade to Noumea, from the nickel mines of Thio to the forests of
Baie du Sud, that does not hate and fear him as some other people hate
and fear sin. The very Canaques flee at the whisper of his coming and
invoke their own dark gods against this white demon in the flesh. Eight
thousand felons bear the thought of him in daily bitterness. We have
been thieves, assassins, poisoners: we have been set aside in a sort of
infected rubbish-box, the sweepings of the prisons: but the last of us,
perishing from thirst, would turn back a cup that had been polluted by
the touch of M. de Nou. When M. de Nou comes to die the devil will have
to dig a deeper pit. Hell is too good for M. de Nou.

He is the executioner. He operates the guillotine. Not for any pay or
profit nor for the rank it gives him: but from cho