coffee-cup noiselessly aside and leant his elbow on the window-sill.

The speaker jerked his thumb in the direction of Olmeta over his left
shoulder far up on the mountainside.

"That story was buried with Perucca," he said, after a long pause.
"Perhaps the Abbe Susini knows it. Who can tell what a priest knows?
There were two Peruccas once--fine, big men--and neither married. The
other--Andrei Perucca--who has been in hell these thirty years, made
sheep's eyes, they told me, at de Vasselot's young wife. She was French,
and willing enough, no doubt. She was dull, down there in that great
chateau; and when a woman is dull she must either go to church or to the
devil. She cannot content herself with tobacco or the drink, like a man.
De Vasselot heard of it. He was a quiet man, and he waited. One day he
began to carry a gun, like you and me--a bad example, eh? Then Andrei
Perucca was seen to carry a gun also. And, of course, in time they
met--up there on the road from Pruneta to Murato. The clouds were down,
and the gregale was blowing cold and showery. It is when the gregale
blows that the clouds seem to whisper as they crowd through the narrow
places up among the peaks, and there was no other sound while these two
men crept round each other among the rocks, like two cats upon a roof. De
Vasselot was quicker and smaller, and as agile as a goat, and Andrei
Perucca lost him altogether. He was a fool. He went to look for him. As
if any one in his senses would go to look for a Corsican in the rocks!
That is how the gendarmes get killed. At length Andrei Perucca raised his
head over a big stone, and looked right into the muzzle of de Vasselot's
gun. The next minute there was no head upon Perucca's shoulders."

The narrator paused, and relighted his pipe with a foul-smelling sulphur
match.