Bibi—His Mark

Front matter

Bibi ~ His Mark

by Achmed Abdullah

Author of "Master of the Hour," "The Charmed Life," "The God of the Invincibly Strong Arms," etc.

I. Bibi L'Teur

CHAPTER I. BIBI L'TEUR.

IT will always remain a moot point if the inner, driving power which gave the final impetus to the man's deed was his animal instinct, his congenital desire to take life, or a result, brutal and crafty, yet eminently great, of that complicated emotion called patriotism.

Certain pompous, pursy, bearded French gentlemen who, robed in the gorgeous crimson silk of the highest judiciary, met one drowsy, zummy spring afternoon in the Palais de Justice, and went there over the man's record—it was entirely black, except where it was tainted with the viscous, fetid red of human blood—decided to credit the score to patriotism; decided, furthermore, to forget the record which had been taken from the files of the secret archives of the Paris police, to blue-pencil it clear across its regrettable length, and, by the same token, to give the man a fresh chance.

He himself, on the other hand, shrugged his feline shoulders in a ribald and very Latin manner, threw his flat palms with the broad, stumpy fingers outward so that the tips curled like ironic question-marks, and said something in metallic Paris slang which, translated into a semblance of civilized speech, meant that he had been bored for a long time with killing citizens and policemen—"d'saigner les pant' et les sergots," to give the exquisite original; that it had always been his ambition to croak one of these here (deleted) aristocrats, for after all, dis donc, mon p'tit boug,' one is a Frenchman, a republican, hein? and—the rest entirely suppressed for reasons of decency, purity, and editorial policy.

Bibi I'Tueur was his name—Bibi the Killer.

As far back as he could remember—and his memory started with a day thirty years earlier when, at the advanced age of seven, a capped, velvet-trousered gentleman called Toto Laripette, who in moments of maudlin drunkenness acknowledged himself as his father, to disclaim the imputation with ferocious oaths in moments of retrospective, alcoholic jealousy, kicked him out into the street and told him to sink or swim on his own hook, he personally didn't give a damn which—as far back as he could remember he had had no other name: Bibi—though the latter half of his name, the Killer, pronounced as the case may be with love, fear, envy, respect, admiration, or hatred, came later on—deservedly.

Bibi the Killer he was, at the heyday of his career, to his girl, his pals, his gang, his enemies, the police, certain inquisitive and fearless newspaper reporters, the wine merchants and restaurant keepers of the neighborhood, and the white-haired, absinth-sodden, bleary-eyed, old harridan who sold fried potatoes in a postern of the Rue de Turbigo, and who every night gave him a generous twisted paper full of her deliciously crisp, golden-brown, salty wares, free of charge, because he reminded her of a lover guillotined forty years earlier.

Given his sobriquet, given the fact that he lived up to it less ostentatiously than conscientiously, given furthermore his physical characteristics—the closely cropped, bullet-shaped head crowned by a peaked, jeering cap that was worn at a rakish angle; the arrogant, beady black eyes on either side of a prying, angular beak with nervous, flaring nostrils; the mouth, cruelly thin yet scarlet with sensuousness; the loose, floppy ears with the lobes extending down the sides of his neck; and the receding chin—it was fitting that, in the cramped old streets in back of the Central Market Halls of Paris, he should be an unchallenged leader among men.

For, more than all the rest of Paris, not excepting even the Bastile, are these alleys and culs-de-sac redolent of blood-stained reminiscences. It was there, in the tortuous, tragic Rue de la Ferronnerie that the bigot madman Ravaillac's dagger found the heart of Henry IV, best and wisest of the kings of France, and just around the corner, in the Rue de la Lingerie, that Paris for centuries dumped the unshriven bodies of the poor into underground vaults. It was there that, before the Revolution, the "bell-man of the dead," in his flapping, black hat, and long, red gown, painted with skulls and cross-bones, paraded the midnight streets, dangling an enormous bell and chanting:

Réveillez-vous, gens qui dorment! Priez Dieu pour les trépassés!

and that, later on—though, as in the case of Bibi I'Tueur, it is a debatable question if the motive was lust of blood or love of country—the French Revolution gathered enormous headway.

It is extremely doubtful if, for generations back, the ancestors of Bibi the Killer kept an exact record as to their children's paternity and maternity.

But what difference did that make?

If he was not sure of his direct progenitors, his parents and grandparents, there was no uncertainty about his being a real son of the quartier. His people had always lived there since before the days of Frangois Villon. Had always bred there. Always killed there. Always died there—except in a few cases when they had died at the Roquette, under the thudding blade of the Red Widow, the guillotine.

For Bibi was an Apache.

Comparatively undisturbed by the police, he had followed his chosen career until, about a year before the outbreak of the great war, a new and ambitious president of the police decided on a general municipal housecleaning. Unfortunately for Bibi the Killer, it coincided with the discovery of a well-dressed Paris stock-broker, robbed, murdered in a dark alley of the quartier, not far from the Rue Verderet.

To his dying day Bibi protested that, at least in this instance, he had been as innocent as the whitest, fleeciest lamb. Only it so happened that the knife which had been stuck neatly between the bourgeois's third and fourth ribs was marked with Bibi's initials, and it was more than doubtful that the police would accept his alibi; namely, that he had loaned his dagger to a casual acquaintance whose name he had forgotten and who had needed it to cut off the rind of a particularly tough wedge of Port du Salut cheese.

Anyway, sipping his peaceful breakfast beverage of black coffee flavored with cognac in a little cafe of the Rue de Turbigo, he read about the corpse and the knife in the morning issue of the Petit Parisien, and arrived at Dieppe just two jumps ahead of the police, increasing the distance to three jumps by the time he reached London, where, head first, like a rat, he bored into the dank purlieus of Soho.

He felt not at home there; neither in Soho nor in Pimlico, nor in the scraggly, smoky, jerry-built whole of the East End, including the maze of the docks whence men go down to the sea in ships. Later on he always referred to London as a singularly tough, stringy, and discouraging leg of mutton, and he heartily condemned the methods of his English confrères.

"Tiens," he would say, "one takes pride in one's business, be it—well—tailoring or bleeding a citizen. And there, in London? Pooh! A brick bounced off somebody's dome! A loaded rubber bludgeon flattening a silk tile! And they call that turning the trick! These English have no imagination, and I, mon vieux, I was not happy there!"

So he left London.

But here, too, the full tale of it is clouded, nebulous, overcast with a haze of sordid romance.

For, strangely, a six days' sensation, consisting in garroting, frisking, and painful injuries suffered by a Member of Parliament on a clear evening in full view of Whitehall Street, and resulting in the heckling of the Cabinet by the purple-faced Tory Member for East Gravesend, who started with demanding a thorough reorganization of Scotland Yard, and ended by clamoring for the immediate resignation of Asquith and the little Welsh attorney—this six days' sensation happened to coincide with Bibi the Killer's shipping out of green Southampton to the New World.

As a stoker! And since never before in all his life had he done a stroke of what the world, rightly or wrongly, calls honest labor, since the animal instinct of self-preservation taught him that here, on board this tight, workaday ship, Bibi the Killer had to be Bibi the Stoker, or—by Gawd! yer shirkin', sneakin', bloody swab of a frog-eater!—the third engineer wanted to know the reason why he felt like a caged, helpless beast.

Thus, when land came in sight, his old spirit asserted itself. Like the flash of the free iron, swung away from the clogging, rusting scabbard, it jerked out. And he sniffed greedily when the shore wind brought the warm reek of New York out to the low-flung drab of Sandy Hook, where the ship was riding to both sea-anchors waiting for the impertinent chug-chug-chugging of the customs launch, and remarked to a fellow stoker, a Frenchman like himself, that he expected to gut this transatlantic town of gold and diamonds and pearls as a fish-woman in the Halles Centrales guts a mackerel.

II. "In Again, Out Again!"

CHAPTER II. "IN AGAIN, OUT AGAIN."

WHEN he went ashore, away from the water-front, up through the evil, sodden streets of that part of town, prurient with dirty memories of the past, slimy with food crushed under foot, blotched with tobacco-juice; with a sooty rain dropping thuddingly, mockingly, and the thick, chocolate-brown mud swishing up in streams; with foul invectives in English, Irish, Yiddish, Greek, and Sicilian spotting the air, with crude posters grimacing the faces of the buildings; as he continued his way through that teeming macrocosm of New York, he repeated his boast to himself.

Here, hedged by the water-front on the west, and grim, frowning warehouses on the east, in these little rickety, secretive, red-brick dwellings, with their stealthy, enigmatic back yards, their skulking gables, and furtive, reticent side entrances, was the safe place where one lived, where one had one's lair, he decided; and—energetic, arduous, thoroughly Latin—he kept straight on his way to find and survey what he was pleased to call his place of business, the streets and houses and shops where the bourgeois—to quote him again literally—fattened their swollen livers—and reddened their indecent noses; and he had no difficulty in discovering that New York was a sandwich, with the Fifth Avenue layer of rich meat between slabs of sober, dry, nourishing bread.

The avenue, with its proud, self-conscious sweep picked out in a gentle curve of lights, with its immaculate, slightly snobbish flanking of shops, its gleaming brasses of automobile and motor-bus, its human throng, leisurely and restless in the same breath, its well-fleshed, muscular, imperturbable police that stemmed the tide with a gesture of white-gloved hands, he dismissed at once as dangerous, and therefore impracticable.

But he welcomed the far West Side's strident babel with the ardor of a bridegroom. It was his hunting-ground, foreordained.

For here his shrewd, calculating eyes beheld everything for the profitable and tranquil pursuit of his sinister vocation: the corner saloons with their lurking side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through the tunnels of its warren; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting wedgewise into mazes of buildings; the deep cellars that gaped like sardonic, toothless maws; the squat, moldy, turgid tenements with the reckless invitation of their fire-escapes; the pawn-brokers' shops, the show-cases garish and pathetic with the cheap luxuries of the poor, and here and there the hard flash of a good diamond, often in an old-fashioned setting.

"Ah, ma p'tite cocotte!" he addressed the unsuspecting town; "I'll bleed you to the marrow!" And when, three hours later, his stoker's dunnage bag still across supple shoulders, he returned in the direction of the little, bedraggled street near the docks that he had picked out for his place of residence, he felt happy and satisfied and pleasurably expectant.

Down the streets he strode, his vulpine mind busy with the easy profits the morrow would bring, with the sun setting in the distant west behind lowering clouds that were like mountains of red-glowing lava; the roofs of the city bathed in purple and peacock light; the windows flashing with a thousand dazzling reflections; with trucks rumbling, trolley-cars shooting south and north, the Elevated clanking and shrieking along its steely spider's web, and motor-cars whirring by on negligent, aristocratic rubber.

He caught a swift gleam and rustle of silk, a faint breath of flower scent, as a woman passed him, and he smiled appreciatively and reminiscently.

A woman? To be sure!

Presently he would find himself a woman; and when he reached the Bowery, when through tattered curtains, with an accompaniment of rattling crockery and fat sizzling in a skillet, he heard high-pitched laughter, then, looking up, saw a girl lean from a window, pretty and pert and fearless, with russet hair piled up like a carved helmet and ice-green eyes beneath level, white brows, he stopped, screwed his face into a smile, and tossed up to her a kiss with the tips of his stumpy fingers—to feel immediately a horny hand clutching his collar from behind and to hear the husky, sepulchral, minatory demand:

"Woddya mean, ye dirty wop, makin' sheep's-eyes at my goil? Woddya mean?" Here Bibi twisted and turned, to the running allegretto of the girl's laughter, and saw the speaker tower above him with two hundred pounds of well-balanced muscle and flesh. "Say! Woddya mean t'rowin' kisses at her?"

And—bing!—bang!—biff!—right on the point of his receding chin so that the teeth rattled like castanets.

"Ah! boug' de saligaud!" Bibi spat like a wildcat.

He jumped sidewise, leaving most of his shirt collar in the other's grasp. Out from his sleeve and into his hand, like a sentient being, flashed the short, broad Apache knife, while the girl in the window screamed:

"Jimmy! Look cut, Jimmy!"

He saw red. He was Bibi l'Tueur—Bibi the Killer.

But, just as the point of his steel danced out with a lethal glimmer and jeer, a policeman's night-stick thudded down on his elbow. His dagger clattered harmlessly in a muddy pool, where it sank with a sucking, blobbing gurgle. A square-toed boot crashed into his shin as, a killer to the last, he turned on his new assailant and jumped at him, thumbs and second fingers ready to strangle and gouge.

And the ultimate result was that, nine hours after his entry into the city which he had boasted to gut like a mackerel, he found himself in the night court, a policeman on either side of him, and the judge, after about two minutes' bored deliberation, saying:

"Six weeks." Then, irritatedly, to the clerk: "Next case, Mr. Hadley!"

A month and a half later he was free once more. Lean he was, with neither money nor weapon, in a strange city; yet as dangerous as a Bengal tiger.

They had not treated him well in prison, nor fed him well.

In Paris, where he had seen the insides of at least two jails, he had even in stripes still been Bibi l'Tueur; and the jailers, familiar with his record—familiar, too, with his gang and his cruelty and his infinite patience in the executing of revenge—had granted him a measure of respect which frequently took the pleasant form of a blue paper package of caporal cigarettes, a drop of cloudy, opalescent absinth, a bottle of white wine.

Here, on the other hand, he had been "the wop," or "Frenchy," or "that dago wot's off his nut," when in moments of crimson rage he started cursing and yelling in metallic Paris argot and bruising his knuckles against the steel walls of his cell, to be at once soothed with a cooling bucket of slops or some other gentle ministration.

Even so he had kept his ears wide open, and he drifted straight from jail to a certain place on the Brooklyn side of the river where criminals foregather, since, penniless, weaponless, and as wary as a jungle beast by the very ferocity of his breeding and life, he had decided that for the time being he must give up his well-calculated plans as to place of residence and operation.

First he would have to find a gang on which to fall back in case of trouble. Doubtless they would hail him as leader.

But when he entered the place, with its cozy, brown boxes, the glistening bar, the smooth-massaged, well-soaped barkeeper in immaculate, virginal white, the pleasant little homy pictures on the clean, calcimined walls; when he found the people who foregathered there, New York criminals, to be sober, rather industrious and conservative men, sipping ginger-ale and other soft drinks, dressed in pin-stripe worsted and bowler hats, with gentle manners and a five-ply business outlook on life, including their own twisted, fantastic share in it, he felt disappointed, and three minutes' conversation changed his disappointment into disgust.

For when he informed them, in his most bombastically careless manner, that he was Bibi the Killer, they smiled languidly and asked him to tell it to the marines; and when, in a sudden fit of rage, perhaps also to show them that he was not bluffing, he jumped with clutching fingers at the throat of a Vermont tory who earned a reasonable livelihood by porch-climbing, he was grievously wounded with a bungstarter, afterward clubbed by a policeman, and sent straight back to jail on the judge's drawling, draconic decree:

"A month. Next case."

In again, out again. And not a chance at his chosen vocation.

He called it bad luck. In reality, that which beat him was the psychology of the melting-pot.

In Paris, in his quartier, he had worn round his bullet-shaped head as true an aura of traditional, romantic glory as a Cecil in England, a Malatesta in Italy, or a Cabot in the city of the bean and the cod. He could do what he pleased. For he was Bibi l'Tueur—and the short Apache knife was his red hand of Ulster.

But New York was snobbishly democratic, even in crime. And businesslike.

A native-born burglar who felt sorry for him and lent him twenty dollars explained it to him. Tried to, rather.

"Don't you see, Frenchy?" he said. "If I have to croak a guy to save my own pelt, I do it. Sure Mike. But I hate like hell to do it. Killing ain't a business. It's an incident—a darned regrettable incident!"

And, to return to the psychology of the melting-pot, somehow the people did not fear him; neither the laborers of many races and tongues against whom he brushed on his truculent way up and down the Bowery; nor the old, red-haired Jewess near the corner of Pell Street, at whose dusty shop he bought a second-hand suit of clothes; neither the Greek who supplied him with oranges and vegetables; nor the fat, elderly Sicilian woman who sublet to him a corner of her back room, including the privileges of the kitchen sink for washing purposes, for two and a half dollars a week, and who took a sort of motherly interest in him—and in whom he confided, as he had always confided in women.

"No, no, caro mio!" she exclaimed, fluttering her grimy, wrinkled hands. "You are wrong, so wrong. My man—he is dead many years—he kill. You betcha life he did. Once he kill, twice—maybe three times. With the stilet'. But he kill for the love, the passion, the great, great, burning hate. For the good reason, the fine reason, the decent reason! But you—a bucarsi esce il sangue—to kill for the sake of the kill? Oh, Madonna!"—and she crossed herself.

Perhaps the real reason why these people did not fear him was the subconscious memory of their great adventure of emigration—never quite understood by the native born. The sudden, keen, pitiless lifting out of the drab, sticky rut of the gray centuries because a ship-agent talks plausibly or because a ship-poster glares in hopeful green and enthusiastic chrome-yellow, and, too, because of the hope of more money, more food, and—perhaps—a dream of liberty. Then the going away from home and country; the leaving of the little inland village where the soul's roots are, where they have always lived, with wife and children and no earthly possessions except the regulation forty dollars and a bundle of threadbare clothes; the steerage journey across an unknown sea to an unknown country.

Yes! The terrible, shining American adventure of the poor foreign emigrant, greater by far than the romantic buccaneering jaunt of Spain's steel-clad knights who, centuries ago, set sail for the New World on their high-pooped frigates mounted with brass cannon—perhaps the sheer, hushed terror of it had scotched the capacity for fear in these people; and fear, the other man's fear, was as necessary for Bibi the Killer's success as the curve and glisten of his dagger.

III. Avec Infâmie

CHAPTER III. AVEC INFÂMIE.

ONE day in August he discovered the truth of it. It was a little after six in the evening, and, following a wave of heat that had come down like crackling, red-hot spears, a rain-storm swept over from Jersey, driving the people to take shelter wherever they could.

The ideal weather to "turn the trick of Père Antoine," grinned Bibi I'Tueur, cracking his fingers to limber them for the grip and twist of the garrote.

Watching from a well-chosen strategical position in a dark doorway on Sixth Avenue, just above the Jefferson Market Court, where a mad, exuberant alley runs into an ancient maze of buildings at an exaggerated angle, to come out near Greenwich Avenue in a fantastic hodgepodge of mews, studios, and little shops where nobody ever buys, he saw a well-dressed, plump business man on a breathless gallop toward the Eighth Street Elevated Station.

Bibi did his work rapidly and neatly. He did not even have to use his knife—which made no difference to him either way, as it was money he wanted that night, and not the acrid tang of human blood.

Out of his hiding-place as quick and straight as a bullet! Foot crashing against chin; right hand squeezing the man's windpipe; left frisking his pockets—and off he was into the alley which he had thoroughly investigated earlier in the day.

But, running, twisting, turning, gliding, doubling, he found to his sorrow and discomfiture that, contrary to Paris, where the people would have helped him—him, Bibi l'Tueur!—here everybody's hand was against his.

A hue and cry.

"Stop thief!"

"Stop thief!"

"There he goes!"—echoed in a dozen languages; and they came from all directions—Poles and Calabrians and Russian Jews and Greeks and Slovaks—they were about him and pulled him down as hounds pull down a stag.

And—back to night court!

Only it so happened that the judge before whom he was brought this time was Moses C. Mandelson—who was a Jew, a scholar, and a self-made man; thus, by the same three tokens, a doer and a dreamer.

His was a strange theory, a stranger practise—for night courts. He held that judging was not synonymous with condemning, but with being just; and he had contempt, even hatred, for the buckram orthodoxy of precedent. The law to him was elastic, thus kindly.

He listened to the tale of the witnesses, the testimony of the policemen, and Bibi's surly replies.

"You are a Frenchman?" he asked.

"Yes."

Mandelson cupped his chin in his hands, studied the finger-print cards which had been brought from the little back room; then suddenly he looked up and spoke in a more peculiar—a more eccentric, his critics called it—manner than he had ever done in all his career.

"My friend," he said—and addressing the prisoners as his friends was another one of his oddities which he explained to his intimates by demanding how he could presume to judge people unless he felt friendly toward them—"the court will try to discover the bead of gold in the bottom of the blackened crucible which is your soul." (Did we mention that Mandelson was a Jew and a dreamer?)

He rose with a swish of his black, silken robe.

"Court temporarily suspended," he announced to the room in general, the scribbling reporters, the policemen waiting for their cases to be called, the special writers greedy for "sob" copy, the social-settlement workers, and the morbid habitués.

Then, again to Bibi:

"Follow me." And he stepped down from the dais and led the way to his private office, where, it was said, he judged more cases than in court; where, too, he smoked very excellent cigars.

"Your honor—please!" Detective Fitzgerald, who had made the arrest, tried to stop him. "The guy's dangerous, your honor! Better let me—"

"The court is able to take care of itself," smiled the judge, and he entered his office, followed by the Apache, and closed the door.

There they were—alone—judge and killer.

Instinctively, like a rangy, dusty, guilty-looking alley cat that senses the friendly intent of a stranger's outstretched hand, Bibi knew that the other was contemplating a kindly deed of some sort.

Wherefore he despised him.

On the other hand, he saw no reason why he should not take advantage of the little man's evident insanity, and so, sitting down across from the judge on the other side of the flat-top desk, he took an additional leaf out of the alley-cat's book of conduct.

He changed his growl into a purr.

Trusting, he looked, and confiding, and he tried his best to squeeze a tear from his wicked, arrogant eyes.

"My friend," said Mandelson, "I am sorry that it is my duty to judge you, to punish you. I do not like to punish people. I do not enjoy it. Why"—and there was an expression of utter seriousness in the man's fine brown eyes—"why do you force me to? Tell me."

Bibi pounced upon his cue. He said the regular thing.

A chance! That's all he wanted, he said in fair English. Just one more chance! And he'd keep straight—yes—straight for all time to come.

"Give me another chance," he begged, lowering his eyes before the other's steady gaze, and thinking how easy it would be to jump up, strangle the judge, and then—away—through the back window! But no. Outside there were policemen on watch, and—

"So you are a Frenchman," came Mandelson's low voice.

"Yes."

"And—from all I can gather—an apache?"

Bibi looked up, suspicious, wary. Apache! The other knew the word, then, doubtless knew what it meant. So that was the reason why he was willing to be friendly and conciliatory! Because he was afraid—afraid of him, Bibi I'Tueur!

"Yes," he snarled. "I am an apache—and a killer, a killer!" and he stuck out his chin at a malevolent angle and went on, in sharp, bawdy-gutter French:

"Et ben, mon p'tit boug'? Qu'est-tu nous chantes?"

But Mandelson did not seem to be aware of the implied threat in the man's words or attitude.

Very casually he lit a cigar, as casually spoke:

"There is work for a killer these days, my friend."

"Work—for—"

Rapidly Bibi reconsidered. Why? Was it possible that this man, this simple, innocent-looking man, wanted to—well—hire him and his dagger to turn a trick, perhaps to murder an enemy?

All right. He was ready to oblige.

But before he had a chance to frame an appropriate question, the judge went on:

"I suppose you know that, three days ago, war broke out between France and Germany? That the invader is overrunning your country? That France is calling all men capable of bearing arms to the colors—to defend the motherland?"

Bibi scratched his head. To be sure, he had heard vaguely about this war. But the news had made no impression on him. Less important it had seemed than his daily drinks and cigarettes, and he wondered what the judge meant by dragging in such an outside subject.

"Yes," he replied, a little surprised, "I know that there is war."

"Very well." The judge spoke as if giving judgment. "You will enlist in the French army. I shall remand you to the Tombs overnight, and early to-morrow morning Detective Fitzgerald will take you to the French consul-general." He ashed his cigar. "You say that you are a killer. Then"—and suddenly his voice leaped up extraordinarily strong and a slow flame eddied up in his eyes—you will kill for a decent cause! You will kill for France, for humanity, for civilization! Come, my friend!" He stretched out a white, womanish hand. "Here's your chance—to make good, to redeem yourself, for all time to come. It will help you—make you—the discipline, the danger—if need be, the supreme sacrifice! Come, my friend!"

Bibi had been thinking rapidly.

The war? Now he came to consider it, it was a rather good joke on the Paris bourgeois, whom he hated and whom he took to be his lawful prey of which fate had robbed him. They were being mustered now, and he smiled at the picture in his mind: how they were drilling their fat bodies into tight, blue uniforms; how they rubbed their obese shoulders raw with the steel of the musket and the taut, dry leather of the haversack.

But—to fight for them, side by side with them? Perhaps to die for them and their pig of a government?

Mais non alors!

Let them croak, these bourgeois, and if in the process they took a goodish number of German bourgeois down to hell with them, so much the better.

For—long live the proletariat!—such, if any, was his political dogma.

But he knew that these were not views he could mention to the judge.

"I cannot fight," he said. "I was in the army three months. I was discharged."

And the surprising thing was that, so far, he had spoken the truth. Twelve years earlier he had been drafted to do his three years, and had been mustered into one of the "convict" regiments that see service in Algiers, Tunis, and the Sahara. Three months he had been with the colors. Then he had been discharged.