“Excuse me, there is a way to ascertain his identity.”

“How?”

“The voice of the wretch is so deeply engraven on my mind, that even at this moment, while I am speaking to you, I think I can hear it in my ear; and I would recognize it among a thousand.”

The lawyer made no reply, weighing, no doubt, in his mind the chances of a confrontation.  Then he made up his mind, and said,—­

“It is worth trying.”

And handing his clerk, who had been a silent witness of this scene, an order to have the accused brought to the hospital, he said,—­

“Take this to the jail, and let them make haste.”

It was a month now since Crochard had been arrested; and his imprisonment, so far from discouraging him, had raised his spirits.  At first, his arrest and the examination had frightened him; but, as the days went by, he recovered his insolence.

“They are evidently looking for evidence,” he said; “but, as they cannot find any, they will have to let me go.”

He looked, therefore, as self-assured as ever when he came into Daniel’s room, and exclaimed, while still in the door, with an air of intolerable arrogance,—­

“Well?  I ask for justice; I am tired of jail.  If I am guilty, let them cut my throat; if I am innocent”—­

But Daniel did not let him finish.

“That is the man!” he exclaimed; “I am ready to swear to it, that is the man!”

Great as was the impudence of Crochard, surnamed Bagnolet, he was astonished, and looked with rapid, restless eyes at the chief surgeon, at the magistrate, and last at Lefloch, who stood immovable at the foot of the bed of his lieutenant.  He had too much experience of legal forms not to know that he had given way to absurd illusions,—­and that his position was far more dangerous than he had imagined.  But what was their purpose? what had they found out? and what did they know positively?  The effort he made to guess all this gave to his face an atrocious expression.

“Did you hear that, Crochard?” asked the lawyer.

But the accused had recovered his self-control by a great effort; and he replied,—­

“I am not deaf.”  And there was in his voice the unmistakable accent of the former vagabond of Paris.  “I hear perfectly well; only I don’t understand.”

The magistrate, finding that, where he was seated, he could not very well observe Crochard, had quietly gotten up, and was now standing near the mantle-piece, against which he rested.

“On the contrary,” he said severely, “you understand but too well Lieut.  Champcey says you are the man who tried to drown him in the Dong-Nai.  He recognizes you.”

“That’s impossible!” exclaimed the accused.  “That’s impossible; for”—­

But the rest of the phrase remained in his throat.  A sudden reflection had shown him the trap in which he had been caught,—­a trap quite familiar to examining lawyers, and terrible by its very simplicity.  But for that reflection, he would have gone on thus,—­