They both leant back against the hut and began their breakfast, when suddenly—it is Marot who tells the tale—Auguste Picot came up on horseback at full gallop, and cried out roughly to his shepherd:
"You scoundrel, do you suppose I give you my bread to have it eaten by beggars and by vagabonds?"
The stranger was on the point of replying to excuse the shepherd, when Picot—so said his accuser—urged his horse on with such brutality that the youth was obliged to raise his stick, to prevent himself being kicked underfoot by the horse. At this movement in self-defence, Picot's horse wheeled round, kicked out with his hind feet, and hit the youth in the chest with one of his hoofs.
The youth fell down unconscious.
Picot then, seeing he had become an unintentional murderer, decided to become one in intention: he turned an accident he was anxious to hide into a crime. He looked round him, he saw on the ground the mallet with which Marot had just been driving in the pickets of his fold, and then (please understand thoroughly that this version is not mine, but the accused's) he dealt him a violent blow on the back of his head, finishing off the wretched tramp, who had only fainted before.
Death was almost instantaneous.
Then he offered all sort of bribes to the shepherd if he would help him to conceal the crime.
The shepherd had been weak enough to be touched by his master's entreaties: he consented to conceal the body in his hut.
Hence the blood-stains on the straw and mattress.