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 abbe 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