Chéri-Bibi told the Nut that he had not opened his lips during the trial. His counsel defended him against his will; and when the dread sentence was pronounced the prisoner thanked the jury for their service to him as well as to society.
That very evening as a prison van was taking him back to the central prison of the town in which he was tried, he heard a heart-rending clamor, and as he was stepping out of the van, he saw that the hospital which stood in the same square was on fire.
It was the work of a moment to free himself from his jailors and to leap into the flames. That evening, single-handed, he saved the lives of sixty.
“Fire!” he cried, “I’m used to fire.”
He left the hospital only to return to it and to come out again with his precious burdens. When the whole of the inmates had been rescued, he gave himself up as a prisoner. His body was a mass of burns.
Throughout France there was but one opinion: He must be reprieved. Thus the death penalty was commuted to penal servitude for life.
“Fatalitas!” said the prisoner when the news was broken to him. “So there’s still need for me to kill someone in the world!”
* * * * *
For a wonder the sight of the Nut’s grief ended by softening the hearts of those wild beasts.
“Don’t take on, Nut. It’s all rot. I tell you that Chéri-Bibi is right enough. To begin with he can’t kick the bucket. There are chaps like that. The very sight of them makes death turn tail.”
Twenty voices were ready to join with the one which had attempted to hearten the unhappy Nut. The thought of a catastrophe of such magnitude as the death of Chéri-Bibi did not enter the minds of a single one of them. Only a warder — or a mischief-maker like “Monsieur Désiré,” would entertain such ridiculous nonsense. The man who could bring down Chéri-Bibi was not yet born. Chéri-Bibi had always done what he had set his mind to do.
When he longed to be off there was nothing more to be said. He knew how to let himself out! The warders were well aware of that. They had seen him subject to the most rigid discipline, never out of sight of a convict guard whose sole duty was to keep watch on his movements, and yet he had found means of getting the better of every obstacle. Moreover he had declared beforehand that he was going away. At the appointed day and hour, the thing was done.
Though he came back again and allowed himself to be recaptured, it was undoubtedly because he could not do without the air of the Pré. As he himself said: “A penal settlement is my hearth and home.”
It was known that Chéri-Bibi invariably carried about with him his “outfit;” that is to say, everything that was necessary to enable him to escape when “it suited him.” And no one knew how he managed to conceal the things.
On one occasion he allowed himself to be caught. He put his “going away kit” in a shoemaker’s last over which he placed a piece of leather studded with nails as if he intended to begin making a pair of boots but the last was hollow and could be unscrewed, and it contained an elaborate collection of “necessaries” — mustaches, whiskers, false hair, a chisel, a small saw for sawing iron made from the spring of a watch, a tiny hand mirror for dressing purposes, needles and thread, and pen and paper.
He often let his shoemaker’s last lie about on his bed, and sometimes he folded it under his arm when he went on forced labor.
It was quite an event when one day the inspecting officer who had been noticing the last for some time, ended by considering that the work of making a pair of boots was taking too long and confiscated it.
This time the fat was in the fire. But Chéri-Bibi had no end of other tricks up his sleeve. He would always get the better of them; that was certain.
At this point in the discussion the door was opened and a deputy warder entered. He came to inquire if they had yet discovered the way by which the five convicts had escaped. His two colleagues replied by a shrug of the shoulders.
“Say what you like, they can’t have flown away,” observed the newcomer.
“Ask Chéri-Bibi.”
“Chéri-Bibi’s dead.”
“Ah, what did I tell you,” exclaimed one of the warders. “Our customers here refuse to believe it.”
“He was killed in the bamboo plantation. The Commandant himself was leading the battle. Bordière fired the shot. Chéri-Bibi was right up against his rifle. Seems that he turned head over heels like a rabbit. Oh, there’s no mistake about it. It was bound to end like that.... Good-by. I’m off.... Oh, it’s made a great to do I can tell you. You must have heard the firing on Devil’s Island. There’s a great stir among the convicts. But there’ll be some pickings for those who find the other four. Bordière is in luck’s way. He’ll get extra pay this month over this Chéri-Bibi job.”
The man left the room. The door was closed behind him and a great uproar of mingled amazement and incredulity arose, for the convicts found it impossible to believe the monstrous story. Chéri-Bibi let himself be knocked over like a rabbit!
Suddenly, while the warders were discussing the event at the far end of the dormitory, a flagstone was quietly raised, and the Nut and the men who were behind the warders saw Chéri-Bibi’s terrible and distorted jaw emerge from the cavity.
No, Chéri-Bibi was not dead. He was not even wounded. He had played his trick of tumbling to the grounds as if he were shot dead when the warder fired his rifle, so as to distract the guards’ attention from the outlet of his underground passage, which he determined to reach, whatever happened, in order to meet the Nut.
What he reckoned on had come about, and when the guards recognized the figure of Chéri-Bibi falling to the ground as he spun on his heels, they made a rush towards him uttering a shout of triumph.
Bordière, the warder, climbed the bank with a light step calculating in his mind the amount of the extra pay which a deed of this sort would be worth to him. The authorities would undoubtedly be grateful to him for relieving them of a brute whom it was so difficult to keep in his cage.
Men hurried up from all directions. The Commandant himself followed close upon them, and the report gradually spread over the island that Chéri-Bibi had at last returned to the lower regions. Some of the warders, as we have said, declared that they had seen his corpse.
The truth was that they searched for him in vain. Bordière, the lucky Bordière, who was responsible for so smart a piece of work, became enraged when he could find no traces of Chéri-Bibi apart from the marks among the bamboos. He offered his own explanation of the mystery: “I saw him fall here. He gave a loud cry and collapsed. Look at all this blood. He’s certainly mortally wounded. He must have crawled away to croak a little farther on.”
The thing was inexplicable, something very like magic. The Commandant stood silent, not knowing what to think. Had Chéri-Bibi any accomplices among his men? Had he bought some of them? How was it possible to tell with a man like that?
They related the story that he invariably carried gold-dust on him. Where? How? They were never able to determine. Some of them went so far as to maintain that he could hide at will thirty gold louis in his stomach. He ate gold, swallowed it, got rid of it, secreted it, and recovered it again as he pleased.
It was a pack of silly tales to which the authorities attached no importance, but now the Commandant began to think that there might be something in them.
Nevertheless what had really happened was capable of an extremely simple explanation. Chéri-Bibi had slipped away through the undergrowth until he came to his retreat and thence reached his opening; and the reason why blood was found on the bamboos was because he had wiped his hands, stained with Tarasque’s blood, on them. While the warders were searching for a dead body he was in his tunnel; and thus his head appeared in the dormitory at the moment when the news of his death was exciting so much talk.
He summed up the situation at a glance. He saw the warders. He saw the Nut. He saw his brother “lifers” who, transfixed in amazement, restrained the burst of laughter with which they were ready to greet the
startling vision that contradicted so flatly the warders’ stories.
In a flash the Nut crept into the cavity and vanished from sight, while Chéri-Bibi kept the other convicts at bay by the ferocity of his look.
The flagstone fell back in its place.
When the convict guards turned round nothing seemed changed in the dormitory. Stay! There was one convict the fewer.
Some time elapsed before they noticed it. It was Monsieur Désiré” who called their attention to it by saying under his breath so that he could be heard only by them:
“Hullo, where’s the Nut?”
Then they began their search.
Their personal responsibility was directly involved in this case. They had no inclination to treat it as a joke. And when they made certain that the Nut also had escaped, they fell into a sudden rage. Once more they turned everything upside down and bullied the men in the dormitory, uttering a thousand threats and oaths. They grew violent when a look from “Monsieur Désiré” told them what they wanted to know.
His look pointed to a flagstone, and as the stone was not properly in its place, and the seams were sprinkled with dust, they at once discovered the secret. They ordered the flagstone to be cleared, whereupon the cavity lay open before them. One of them descended into it, requesting the other to remain at his post.
Almost at once the echo of two, three, four shots was heard. The warder running forward in the little tunnel was firing on the fugitives.
The entire staff of the Penitentiary Administration was called into action. By the Lieutenant’s orders the clerical staff telephoned to the deputy-chiefs on the other islands, informing them of the escape of six convicts, and instructing them to take the necessary measures to recapture them before they could, by some unforeseen means, reach the mainland.
The gun on the roof of the tower which dominated the penitentiary huts on Devil’s Island, placed in position at the time of Dreyfus’s imprisonment, was fired, thus proclaiming that the roadstead was closed.
All the convict guards and forces in the islands which the authorities had at their command were set to work hunting for the absent men.
The Inspecting Officer, whom the “lifers” had nicknamed “Haversack,” threw himself into the fray with furious ardor; and his exasperation was entirely comprehensible, for Chéri-Bibi had already played tricks on him; but the peculiar incidents of this last trick which had been carried out under his very nose were more than he could bear. The miscreant had killed Tarasque by the light of his cigar!
He worked himself up into a fury when, on returning from his rounds in the dormitories, he learned that other convicts had followed Chéri-Bibi in his flight, while nothing was known of the means by which they had escaped.
He went with his men to meet the Commandant, who had finished his beating-up of the game and, like himself, had not obtained a glimpse of even Chéri-Bibi’s shadow. Of course no one now believed in his death.
When the Commandant was informed of the extent of the disaster, he exclaimed to the Lieutenant:
We must warn Cayenne, Kourou, Sinnamarie, St. Laurent and the other stations on the coast. I look upon it as most unfortunate, but we mustn’t lose time. The convicts must have felt certain of being able to leave the roadstead or they wouldn’t have attempted such a stroke, and possibly they have made terms with some vessel passing through. What’s that Dutch schooner which dropped anchor off the harbor last night? Perhaps she has lowered a boat, or perhaps the men have joined some small craft by swimming out to her.”
“Let’s hope the sharks will get ’em!” returned the Lieutenant.
“Meantime, while we are looking for Chéri-Bibi here, the other convicts have probably already got outside our waters. Go and telephone to Cayenne and Kourou at once.”
“I suggest, Commandant, that it might be better while our people are telephoning to Cayenne for me to go in the motor-launch to the mainland. I should get to Kourou very quickly, for it is only about eight miles from here, and I could convey orders to Sinnamarie and St. Laurent, and see personally that the steps which have to be taken are carried out. Not forgetting that if I meet our ‘jail-birds’ on the way I can bring them back to you at once.”
“I agree. Take a couple of well-armed overseers with you, and shoot at sight anyone you may meet who refuses to obey orders.”
The Lieutenant saluted and hurriedly made for the jetty.
We left the Parisian, the Burglar, the Caid and the Joker hiding in the fore deck-house on the launch. They still remained there in a frame of mind that it is easy to picture. Sufficient time had elapsed for them to realize that their escape was no longer a secret to anyone. The commotion in the island, the galloping of patrols, and finally the firing of the gun on Devil’s Island, sufficed to put them in possession of the facts.
“We’re badly done,” the Burglar said aloud. “There’s no hope for us with this caboodle as we can’t make her go. If Chéri-Bibi and the Nut turn up we may be able to come to an understanding.”
Instead of Chéri-Bibi and the Nut they saw the Lieutenant and two warders, armed to the teeth, hurrying towards them. The three men boarded the launch.
The runaways had not stirred. In the pitchy darkness which shrouded them they might hope to escape observation for a while. Their last chance depended upon none of the men coming in to the deck-house for a length of rope or any article necessary for the working of the launch.
They held their breath. Fortunately for them the engineer was not on board and the officer would have to put off without him. He would have his hands full attending to the engine during the journey. He had already taken from his pocket the special part of the machinery and placed it in position.
The convicts had more to fear from the warders, but at the word of command the latter climbed to the top of the deck-house, where they remained, rifle in hand, keeping watch, and peering into the night. The convicts could hear the sound of their movements above them.
The officer himself unmoored the chains and threw them into the deck-house, where they fell on the Burglar and the Joker, who did not dare even to make an exclamation!
And the launch put off.
They first sailed round the island at full speed. Obviously the officer had no intention of leaving those waters without first making this circular tour which might, if he had the least luck and discovered anything unusual, put him on the track of the fugitives or reveal to him some part of their scheme.
Finding nothing suspicious, he returned to the roadstead, hailed the Dutch schooner, jumped aboard her, and quickly learned that all was in order and that her ship’s boat and dinghy had not been lowered. After exchanging a few words with the captain he returned to the launch.
During his short absence the four convicts were greatly tempted to dash out of their retreat and attack the warders.
But it would have been a risky enterprise, offering very little prospect of success. The warders were armed and would have shot them down like dogs. Moreover, it would have been difficult to take them by surprise. At the least sound coming from below they would have been on their guard and realized that the game for which they were to go hunting so far away was close at hand! Not to mention that they were in the roadstead and assistance would be forthcoming immediately. If the convicts wished to attempt an onset of that character it would be better to wait until they were under way.
The launch was now steering for the mainland and fast leaving the islands behind her.
The crossing was rapid. The launch cut through the water in excellent style. No incident occurred during the brief passage.
The adventure was shaping so splendidly for the four convicts that they had but to let things take their course. They would very soon see what was what. An immense hope began to dawn in them.
The launch came-to alongside the pontoon at Kourou. It was here that the drama for the Parisian and his gang would reach its climax. They were nearing the crucial moment.
The chains with which the lau
nch was moored were in the deck-house, resting on the convicts’ knees! Could they suppose that the officer and the warders would lay hold of them without discovering the men in their lair?
They had every reason to hope so, because the ends of the chains were outside the deck-house, and all the warders had to do was to stoop and pick up these ends and the rest of the chains would be at their disposal. That was what actually did happen.
A warder stooped and even turned his head towards the retreat in which the miscreants stood ready to leap forth at the least incident, but he failed to observe them.
The officer, as was his custom, made the engine unworkable by removing the special part, and after mooring the launch, climbed on to the pontoon, ordering his two men to follow him. The three of them soon vanished into the darkness.
The Parisian, the Burglar, the Caid and the Joker heaved a tremendous sigh of relief. During the last half-hour they had scarcely dared to breathe.
The Burglar took off his cap, and bowing in the direction taken by the “Haversack,” said with an intonation of mingled excitement and gratitude: “Good-by, and thank you.”
Soon they were crouching on the pontoon on the look-out for the guard who was stationed at this point. As they could not see him, they partly rose and began to run for the shore, when suddenly they heard behind them loud shouts and the order to halt.
Of course they ran for all they were worth. A shot was fired after them.
“Look out,” grunted the Parisian. “Now for the forest, and in less than no time!”
CHAPTER VI
PERNAMBOUC, THE PRISON EXECUTIONER
THOUGH THE WARDER was taking pot-shots at them, Chéri-Bibi and the Nut had received too great a start to run any risk of being hit. When, a few minutes later, the warder came to the outlet of the tunnel through which the six convicts had escaped, he set up a music which may be imagined.
The two convicts found that they were cut off from the road to the jetty, and were obliged to fall back into a small wood of tall forest trees.
Collected Works of Gaston Leroux Page 189