"Poles, to help them," suggested Véronique.
The black specks were still floating. There were nine of them, the nine heads of the survivors, whose arms also the two women saw moving from time to time and whose cries for help they heard.
Some were hurriedly moving away from the motor-boat, but four were swimming towards it; and, of those four, two could not fail to reach it.
Suddenly François and Stéphane made the same movement, the movement of marksmen taking aim.
There were two flashes, followed by the sound of a single report.
The heads of the two swimmers disappeared.
"Oh, the monsters!" stammered Véronique, almost swooning and falling on her knees.
Her voice did not carry, first because it was too weak and then the wind was in her face. But she continued:
She next stumbled across the room and into the corridor, in search of something, and returned to the window, still shouting:
She had ended by finding the shell which she used as a signal. But, on lifting it to her mouth, she found that she could produce only dull and indistinct sounds from it:
"Oh, curse the thing!" she cried, flinging the shell away. "I have no strength left . . . . François! François!"
She was terrible to look at, with her hair all in disorder and her face covered with the sweat of fever. Véronique implored her:
The motor-boat was drifting forward down below, with the two marksmen at their posts, holding their guns ready for murder.
The survivors fled. Two of them hung back in the rear.
These two were aimed at. Their heads disappeared from view.
"But look at them!" Honorine said, explosively, in a hoarse voice. "They're hunting them down! They're killing them like game! . . . Oh, the poor people of Sarek! . . ."
Another shot. Another black speck vanished.
Véronique was writhing in despair. She shook the rails of the balcony, as she might have shaken the bars of a cage in which she was imprisoned.
"Vorski! Vorski!" she groaned, stricken by the recollection of her husband. "He's Vorski's son!"
Suddenly she felt herself seized by the throat and saw, close to her own face, the distorted face of the Breton woman.
"He's your son!" spluttered Honorine. "Curse you! You are the monster's mother and you shall be punished for it!"