rded myself as a victim of
injustice.

* * * * * *

One morning I found myself face to face with Termite, Brisbille's crony
and accomplice, and he arrived in our company by voluntary enlistment!
He was as skimpy and warped as ever, his body seeming to grimace
through his uniform. His new greatcoat looked worn out and his boots
on the wrong feet. He had the same ugly, blinking face and
black-furred cheeks and rasping voice. I welcomed him warmly, for by
his enlistment he was redeeming his past life. He took advantage of
the occasion to address me with intimacy. I talked with him about
Viviers and even let him share the news that Marie had just written to
me--that Monsieur Joseph Boneas was taking an examination in order to
become an officer in the police.

But the poacher had not completely sloughed his old self. He looked at
me sideways and shook in the air his grimy wrist and the brass identity
disk that hung from it--a disk as big as a forest ranger's, perhaps a
trophy of bygone days. Hatred of the rich and titled appeared again
upon his hairy, sly face. "Those blasted nationalists," he growled;
"they spend their time shoving the idea of revenge into folks' heads,
and patching up hatred with their Leagues of Patriots and their
military tattoos and their twaddle and their newspapers, and when their
war does come they say '_Go_ and fight.'"

"There are some of them who have died in the first line. Those have
done more than their duty."

With the revolutionary's unfairness, the little man would not admit it.
"No--they have only done their duty,--no more."

I was going to urge Monsieur Joseph's weak constitution but in presence
of that puny man with his thin, furry face, who might have stayed at
home, I forebore. But I decided to avoid, in his company, those
subjects in which I felt he was full of sour hostility and always ready
to bite.

Continually we saw Marcassin's eye fixed on us, though aloof. His new
bestriped personality had completely covered up the comical picture of
Petrolus. He even seemed to have become suddenly more educated, and
made no mistakes when he spoke. He multiplied himself, was
attentiveness itself and found ways to expose himself to danger. When
there were night patrols in the great naked cemeteries bounded by the
graves of the living, he was always in them.

But he scowled. We were short of the sacred fire, in his opinion, and
that dist