He had lost an eye and some teeth in this accident,
beside sustaining a fracture of the right leg, immediately above the
ankle. He had kept the injuries to his face as profound a secret as he
could. The result was, that the glass eye which had done duty for the
one he had lost remained in the socket, slightly displaced, of course,
but recognizable by the "artist" who had supplied it.
More pointedly recognizable were the teeth, peculiar in workmanship,
which one of the ablest dentists in Paris had himself adapted to the
chasms, the cast of which, owing to peculiarities in the accident, he
happened to have preserved. This cast precisely fitted the gold plate
found in the mouth of the skull. The mark, also, above the ankle, in the
bone, where it had reunited, corresponded exactly with the place where
the fracture had knit in the limb of Gabriel Gaillarde.
The Colonel, his younger brother, had been furious about the
disappearance of Gabriel, and still more so about that of his money,
which he had long regarded as his proper keepsake, whenever death should
remove his brother from the vexations of living. He had suspected for a
long time, for certain adroitly discovered reasons, that the Count de
St. Alyre and the beautiful lady, his companion, countess, or whatever
else she was, had pigeoned him.
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