The Clique of Gold, Emile Gaboriau [if you liked this book .txt] 📗

enough, now looked all benevolent curiosity,—so much so, that the two sailors who had captured the man were furious, and said aloud,—

“Ah! don’t believe him, commandant, the dirty dog!”

But the man, evidently encouraged by the surgeon’s apparent kindliness, asked,—

“Am I to be allowed to defend myself, or not?”

And then he added in a tone of supreme impudence,—

“However, whether I defend myself or not, it will, no doubt, be all the same. Ah! if I were only a sailor, or even a marine, that would be another pair of sleeves; they would hear me! But now, I am nothing but a poor civilian; and here everybody knows civilians must have broad shoulders. Wrong or right, as soon as they are accused, they are convicted.”

The doctor seemed to have made up his mind; for he interrupted this flow of words, saying in his kindest voice,—

“Calm yourself, my friend. There is a test which will clearly establish your innocence. The ball that has struck Lieut. Champcey is still in the wound; and I am the man who is going to take it out, I promise you. We all here have rifles with conical balls; you are the only one who has an ordinary shot-gun with round balls, so there is no mistake possible. I do not know if you understand me?”

Yes, he understood, and so well, that his pale face turned livid, and he looked all around with frightened glances. For about six seconds he hesitated, counting his chances; then suddenly falling on his knees, his hands folded, and beating the ground with his forehead, he cried out,—

“I confess! Yes, it may be I who have hit the officer. I heard the bushes moving in his direction, and I fired at a guess. What a misfortune! O God, what a misfortune! Ah! I would give my life to save his if I could. It was an accident, gentlemen, I swear. Such accidents happen every day in hunting; the papers are full of them. Great God! what an unfortunate man I am!”

The doctor had stepped back. He now ordered the two sailors who had arrested the man, to make sure of him, to bind him, and carry him to Saigon to prison. One of the gentlemen, he said, would write a few lines, which they must take with them. The man seemed to be annihilated.

“A misfortune is not a crime,” he sighed out. “I am an honest mechanic.”

“We shall see that in Saigon,” answered the surgeon.

And he hastened away to see if all the preparations had been made to carry the wounded man. In less than twenty minutes, and with that marvellous skill which is one of the characteristic features of good sailors, a solid litter had been constructed; the bottom formed a real mattress of dry leaves; and overhead a kind of screen had been made of larger leaves. When they put Daniel in, the pain caused him to utter a low cry of pain. This was the first sign of life he had given.

“And now, my friends,” said the doctor, “let us go! And bear in mind, if you shake the lieutenant, he is a dead man.”

It was hardly eight in the morning when the melancholy procession started homeward; and it was not until between two and three o’clock on the next morning that it entered Saigon, under one of those overwhelming rains which give one an idea of the deluge, and of which Cochin China has the monopoly. The sailors who carried the litter on which Daniel lay had walked eighteen hours without stopping, on footpaths which were almost impassable, and where every moment a passage had to be cut through impenetrable thickets of aloes, cactus, and jack-trees. Several times the officers had offered to take their places; but they had always refused, relieving each other, and taking all the time as ingenious precautions as a mother might devise for her dying infant. Although, therefore, the march lasted so long, the dying man felt no shock; and the old doctor said, quite touched, to the officers who were around him,—

“Good fellows, how careful they are! You might have put a full glass of water on the litter, and they would not have spilled a drop.”

Yes, indeed! Good people, rude and rough, no doubt, in many ways, coarse sometimes, and even brutal, bad to meet on shore the day after pay-day, or coming out from a drinking-shop, but keeping under the rough outside a heart of gold, childlike simplicity, and the sacred fire of noblest devotion. The fact was, they did not dare breathe heartily till after they had put their precious burden safe under the hospital porch.

Two officers who had hastened in advance had ordered a room to be made ready. Daniel was carried there; and when he had been gently put on a white, good bed, officers and sailors withdrew into an adjoining room to await the doctor’s sentence. The latter remained with the wounded man, with two assistant surgeons who had been roused in the meantime.

Hope was very faint. Daniel had recovered his consciousness during the journey, and had even spoken a few words to those around him, but incoherent words, the utterance of delirium. They had questioned him once or twice; but his answers had shown that he had no consciousness of the accident which had befallen him, nor of his present condition; so that the general opinion among the sailors who were waiting, and who all had more or less experience of shot-wounds, was, that fever would carry off their lieutenant before sunrise.

Suddenly, as if by magic, all was hushed, and not a word spoken.

The old surgeon had just appeared at the door of the sick-chamber; and, with a pleasant and hopeful smile on his lips, he said,—

“Our poor Champcey is doing as well as could be expected; and I would almost be sure of his recovery, if the great heat was not upon us.”

And, silencing the murmur of satisfaction which arose among them at this good news, he went on to say,—

“Because, after all, serious as the wound is, it is nothing in comparison with what it might have been; and what is more, gentlemen, I have the corpus delicti.”

He raised in the air, as he said this, a spherical ball, which he held between his thumb and forefinger.

“Another instance,” he said, “to be added to those mentioned by our great masters of surgery, of the oddities of projectiles. This one, instead of pursuing its way straight through the body of our poor friend, had turned around the ribs, and gone to its place close by the vertebral column. There I found it, almost on the surface; and nothing was needed to dislodge it but a slight push with the probe.”

The shot-gun taken from the hands of the murderer had been deposited in a corner of the large room: they brought it up, tried the ball, and found it to fit accurately.

“Now we have a tangible proof,” exclaimed a young ensign, “an unmistakable proof, that the wretch whom our men have caught is Daniel’s murderer. Ah, he might as well have kept his confession!”

But the old surgeon replied with a dark frown,—

“Gently,