He was dressed in snuff-coloured clothes, and
his legs under his knee-breeches were of a ludicrous thinness. He shook
his head at me with an air of sad wisdom, and I could read little
comfort in his inhuman grey eyes. But it was the man called Toussac who
alarmed me most. He was a colossus; bulky rather than tall, but
misshapen from his excess of muscle. His huge legs were crooked like
those of a great ape; and, indeed, there was something animal about his
whole appearance, something for he was bearded up to his eyes, and it
was a paw rather than a hand which still clutched me by the collar. As
to his expression, he was too thatched with hair to show one, but his
large black eyes looked with a sinister questioning from me to the
others. If they were the judge and jury, it was clear who was to be
executioner.
'Whence did he come? What is his business? How came he to know the
hiding-place?' asked the thin man.
'When he first came I mistook him for you in the darkness,' Lesage
answered. 'You will acknowledge that it was not a night on which one
would expect to meet many people in the salt-marsh.
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