How much longer the landlord would have stood this sort of thing, Hewitt’s informant said, was a matter of conjecture, for on the Saturday afternoon in question the tenancy had come to a startling full-stop.  Rameau had been murdered in his room, and the body had, in the most unaccountable fashion, been secretly removed from the premises.

The strongest possible suspicion pointed to a man who had been employed in shoveling and carrying coals, cleaning windows, and chopping wood for several of the buildings, and who had left that very Saturday.  The crime had, in fact, been committed with this man’s chopper, and the man himself had been heard, again and again, to threaten Ramean, who, in his brutal fashion, had made a butt of him.  This man was a Frenchman, Victor Goujon by name, who had lost his employment as a watchmaker by reason of an injury to his right hand, which destroyed its steadiness, and so he had fallen upon evil days and odd jobs.

He was a little man of no great strength, but extraordinarily excitable, and the coarse gibes and horse-play of the big negro drove him almost to madness.  Rameau would often, after some more than ordinarily outrageous attack, contemptuously fling Goujon a shilling, which the little Frenchman, although wanting a shilling badly enough, would hurl back in his face, almost weeping with impotent rage.  “Pig! Canaille!” he would scream.  “Dirty pig of Africa!  Take your sheelin’ to vere you ’ave stole it! Voleur!  Pig!”

There was a tortoise living in the basement, of which Goujon had made rather a pet, and the negro would sometimes use this animal as a missile, flinging it at the little Frenchman’s head.  On one such occasion the tortoise struck the wall so forcibly as to break its shell, and then Goujon seized a shovel and rushed at his tormentor with such blind fury that the latter made a bolt of it.  These were but a few of the passages between Rameau and the fuel-porter, but they illustrate the state of feeling between them.

Goujon, after correspondence with a relative in France who offered him work, gave notice to leave, which expired on the day of the crime.  At about three that afternoon a housemaid, proceeding toward Rameau’s rooms, met Goujon as he was going away.  Goujon bade her good-by, and, pointing in the direction of Rameau’s rooms, said exultantly:  “Dere shall be no more of the black pig for me; vit ’im I ’ave done for.  Zut!  I mock me of ’im!  ’E vill never tracasser me no more.”  And he went away.

The girl went to the outer door of Rameau’s rooms, knocked, and got no reply.  Concluding that the tenant was out, she was about to use her keys, when she found that the door was unlocked.  She passed through the lobby and into the sitting-room, and there fell in a dead faint at the sight that met her eyes.  Rameau lay with his back across the sofa and his head—­drooping within an inch of the ground.  On the head was a fearful gash, and below it was a pool of blood.