These men in their turn spun on their heels and dropped. It was a murderous game, an absolute massacre. The more favoured, those who escaped the bullets, were taken prisoners on the line of the barricades and set aside for execution. And suddenly all grew quiet again. Like a fountain when the water is turned off, the precious sheaf wavered, grew smaller and smaller and disappeared from sight. The troops remaining at the barricades completed the rout of the assailants, while the satellites who made up the guard of honour gathered the gold in rush baskets collected at the fore of the wreck on which Rolleston was performing his antics. The harvest did not take long. The baskets were brought up briskly and the sharing began, a revolting and grotesque spectacle. Eyes burned with greed, hands trembled. The sight, the touch, the sound of the gold drove all these men mad. No famishing beasts of prey, disputing a bleeding quarry, could display greater ferocity and spite. Each man hid his booty in his pockets or in a handkerchief knotted at the corners. Rolleston put his into a canvas bag which he held clasped in his arms: "Kill the prisoners, the new ones as well as the others!" he shouted, relapsing into drunkenness. "Have them executed! After that, we'll string them all up, so that they can be seen from everywhere and nobody will dare attack us. Kill them comrades! And M. Dubosc to begin with! Who'll attend to M. Dubosc? I haven't the energy myself." The comrades rushed forward. One of them, more agile than the rest, seized Simon by the throat, jammed his head against the broken mast and, pressing the barrel of his revolver against his temple, fired four times. "Well done!" cried Rolleston! "Well done!" "Well done!" cried the others, stamping with rage around the executioner. The man had covered Simon's head with a strip of cloth already spotted with blood, which he knotted round the mast, so that its ends, brought level with the forehead and turned upwards, looked like a donkey's ear, which provoked an explosion of merriment. Simon did not feel the least surprise on discovering that he was still alive, that he had not even been wounded by those four shots fired point-blank. This was the way of the incredible nightmare, a succession of illogical acts and disconnected events which he could neither foresee nor understand. In the very article of death, he was saved by circumstances as absurd as those which had led him to death's threshold. An unloaded weapon, an impulse of pity in his executioners: no explanation gave a satisfactory reply. In any case, he did not make a movement which might attract attention and he remained like a corpse within the bonds which held him fixed in a perpendicular position and behind the veil which hid his face, the face of a living man.