As it is
cruelly cold, he is wrapped up all over. He wears a cape which is
half goatskin and half sheepskin, half brown and half whitish, and
this twofold skin of tints geometrically cut makes him like some
strange occult animal.
Pepin has a cotton cap so soiled and so shiny with grease
that it might be made of black silk. Volpatte, inside his Balaklava
and his fleeces, resembles a walking tree-trunk. A square opening
betrays a yellow face at the top of the thick and heavy bark of the
mass he makes, which is bifurcated by a couple of legs.
"Let's look up the 10th. They've always got the needful. They're on
the Pylones road, beyond the Boyau-Neuf."
The four alarming objects get under way, cloud-shape, in the trench
that unwinds itself sinuously before them like a blind alley,
unsafe, unlighted, and unpaved. It is uninhabited, too, in this
part, being a gangway between the second lines and the first lines.
In the dusty twilight two Moroccans meet the fire-questing cooks.
One has the skin of a black boot and the other of a yellow shoe.
Hope gleams in the depths of the cooks' hearts.
"Matches, boys?"
"Napoo," replies the black one, and his smile reveals his long
crockery-like teeth in his cigar-colored mouth of moroccan leather.
In his turn the yellow one advances and asks, "Tobacco? A bit of
tobacco?" And be holds out his greenish sleeve and his great hard
paw, in which the cracks are full of brown dirt, and the nails
purplish.
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