raised their guns to him. Because he stopped their thieving and their lawlessness, they shoot him. He drove their cattle from the fields because they were Perucca's fields, and he was paid to watch his master's interests. But Perucca they dare not touch, because his clan is large, and would hunt the murderer down. If he was caught, the Peruccas would make sure of the jury—ay! And of the judge at Bastia—but Pietro is not of Corsica; he has no friends and no clan, so justice is not for him.”
She knelt down again as she spoke and laid her hand on her dead husband's back, but she made no attempt to move him. For although Pietro Andrei was an Italian, his wife was Corsican—a woman of Bonifacio, that grim town on a rock so often besieged and never yet taken by a fair fight. She had been brought up in, as it were, an atmosphere of conventional lawlessness, and knew that it is well not to touch a dead man till the gendarmes have seen him, but to send a child or an old woman to the gendarmerie, and then to stand aloof and know nothing; and feign stupidity; so that the officials, when they arrive, may find the whole village at work in the fields or sitting in their homes, while the dead, who can tell no tales, has suddenly few friends and no enemies.
Then Andrei's widow rose slowly to her feet. Her face was composed now and set. She arranged the black silk handkerchief on her head, and set her dress in order. She was suddenly calm and quiet. “But see,” she said, looking round into eyes that failed to meet her own, “in this country each man must execute his own justice. It has always been so, and it will be so, so long as there are any Corsicans left. And if there is no man left, then the women must do it.”
She tied her apron tighter, as if about to undertake some hard domestic duty, and brushed the dust from her black dress.
“Come here,” she said, turning to the child, and lapsing into the soft dialect of the south and east—“come here, thou child of Pietro Andrei.”
The child came forward. He was probably two years old, and understood nothing that was passing.
“See here, you of Olmeta,” she said composedly; and, stooping down, she dipped her finger in the pool of blood that had collected in the dust. “See here—and here.”
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