ht at Baden--I was dealing, and know--she won twelve thousand
francs in as many minutes. Here her slavery began. It will continue until
Frontignac is discovered and captured; then he will put a second bullet
into his own head. When I saw her enter my room I knew he had turned up
again. As she staggered out, one of my men shadowed her. I was right;
Frontignac was skulking in the garden."

All my disgust for the croupier returned in an instant. He was still the
same bloodless spider of the night before. I could hardly keep my hands
off him.

"And you permit this, and let this woman suffer these tortures, her life
made miserable by this scoundrel, when a word, even a look, from you would
send him out of the country and"--

"Softly, monsieur, softly. Why blame me? What business is it of mine. Do I
love the cripple? Have I robbed the bank and murdered my double? This is
not my game; it is Frontignac's. Would you have me kick over his chess
board?"

JONATHAN

He was so ugly,--outside, I mean: long and lank, flat-chested, shrunken,
round-shouldered, stooping when he walked; body like a plank, arms and
legs like split rails, feet immense, hands like paddles, head set on a
neck scrawny as a picked chicken's, hair badly put on and in patches, some
about his head, some around his jaws, some under his chin in a half
moon,--a good deal on the back of his hands and on his chest. Nature had
hewn him in the rough and had left him with every axe mark showing.

He wore big shoes tied with deer hide strings and nondescript breeches
that wrinkled along his knotted legs like old gun covers. These were
patched and repatched with various hues and textures,--parts of another
pair,--bits of a coat and fragments of tailor's cuttings. Sewed in their
seat was half of a cobbler's apron,--for greater safety in sliding over
ledges and logs, he would tell you. Next came a leather belt polished
with use, and then a woolen shirt,--any kind of a shirt,--cross-barred or
striped,--whatever the store had cheapest, and over that a waistcoat with
a cotton back and some kind of a front, looking like a state map, it had
so many colored patches. There was never any coat,--none that I remember.
When he wore a coat he was another kind of a Jonathan,--a store-dealing
Jonathan, or a church-going Jonathan, or a town-meeting Jonathan,--not the
"go-a-fishin'," or "bee-huntin'," or "deer-stalkin'" Jonathan whom I knew.

There was a wide straw hat, too, th