habit with him when puzzled, and stood looking down out of the corner of his eyes at the ground.
It was he, however, who moved first, and, stooping, loosed the clenched fingers round the gun. It was a double-barrelled gun, at full cock, and every man in the little crowd assembled carried one like it. To this day, if one meets a man, even in the streets of Corte or Ajaccio, who carries no gun, it may be presumed that it is only because he pins greater faith on a revolver.
Neither hammer had fallen, and the abbé gave a little nod. It was, it seemed, the usual thing to make quite sure before shooting, so that there might be no unnecessary waste of powder or risk of reprisal. The woman looked at the gun, too, and knew the meaning of the raised hammers.
She leapt to her feet, and looked round at the sullen faces.
“And some of you know who did it,” she said; “and you will help the murderer when he goes to the macquis, and take him food, and tell him when the gendarmes are hunting him.”
She waved her hand fiercely towards the mountains, which loomed, range behind range, dark and forbidding to the south, towards Calvi and Corte. But the men only shrugged their shoulders; for the forest and the mountain brushwood were no longer the refuge they used to be in this the last year of the iron rule of Napoleon III, who, whether he possessed or not the Corsican blood that his foes deny him, knew, at all events, how to rule Corsica better than any man before or since.
“No, no,” said the priest, soothingly. “Those days are gone. He will be taken, and justice will be done.”
But he spoke without conviction, almost as if he had no faith in this vaunted regeneration of a people whose history is a story of endless strife—as if he could see with a prophetic eye thirty years into the future, down to the present day, when the last state of that land is worse than the first.
“Justice!” cried the woman. “There is no justice in Corsica! What had Pietro done that he should lie there? Only his duty—only that for which he was paid. He was the Perucca's agent, and because he made the idlers pay their rent, they threatened him. Because he put up fences, they
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