: The Dark Road: further adventures of Chéri-Bibi by Leroux Gaston - Adventure stories; French fiction 20th century; Escaped prisoners Fiction; Penal colonies French Guiana Fiction

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THE NUT

The Nut lay on the scorching beach facing the terrible sea in which the hungry sharks, the warders of his prison, were disporting. The convict was like a weary animal at rest. In truth, he had availed himself of the "relaxation" at ten o'clock to seek out a little fresh air and seclusion between two precipitous crags which cut him off from the rest of the convict settlement. If only he could live alone! No longer to hear anything. No longer to see anything! No longer to think of anything. But how could he help thinking of what he had seen, of what he had been compelled to see, that morning?

A double execution had taken place that very morning as an awful but necessary example. It was a smart piece of work by Pernambouc, the prison executioner, and his assistant, "Monsieur D?sir?." . . . Oh the horror of it!

The Nut was still shuddering from the sight of it. He was a young man in the fullness of his supple strength. He lay resting on his elbows, holding his chin in the cup of his hands, apparently indulging in an impossible dream. His broad-brimmed straw hat cast its shadow over the gloom of his penetrating gaze which stole to the distant skyline. The outline of his clean-shaven face as far as could be seen indicated strength of character and shrewdness. Notwithstanding the ineffaceable marks of prison life which soon transforms the youngest convict into an old man, the Nut seemed to be scarcely more than forty years of age.

It was this combination of strength and refinement which had brought down on him the nickname of The Nut. It is a word which in the language of the Pr?, or convict settlement, denotes a man whom nature has endowed with a fine bearing usually appreciated by women. "He acted as if he were the master." But the Nut's real name, Raoul de Saint-Dalmas, had been in famous criminal records some ten years before when the jury of the Seine Assize Court condemned him to death. He was a young man of good family who, after squandering his substance, had been charged with murdering his employer in order to rob him.

He owed his reprieve to his youth, to his mother, who in her despair died of grief, and to the persistence with which he proclaimed his innocence in spite of proofs which were seemingly overwhelming. And now he was in the convict settlement undergoing a sentence of penal servitude for life.

"Why do you sigh, Nut?"

He gave a start and turned round.

Bursts of coarse laughter rang out, and his eyes encountered seated round him the Parisian, the Burglar, the Caid and the Joker. His dreams had carried him so far away that he had failed to hear their approach.

The four men were his worst enemies. They never relented, and as a result he had not hesitated latterly to get himself imprisoned for months together in the ?le St. Joseph, the island of silence, which was near, and reserved for those who committed offenses in the convict settlement or whose feelings rebelled against the convict gang.

In order to avoid those four monsters who tormented him with their infernal mischief-making and their abominable jokes, he tried to fasten a quarrel on one of the convict guards by seriously threatening him, for which he suffered the terrible punishment of internment on the adjoining island, where the overseers themselves were not permitted to communicate with the prisoners by word of mouth, but only by signs and in writing.

He left his solitary confinement with a feeling of regret, especially as Ch?ri-Bibi, the astonishing bandit who had terrorized the world for so many years--Ch?ri-Bibi had made a friend of him--was no longer there to silence by a frown the loathsome Burglar or the Parisian himself.

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