He raised his eyes and saw the two muzzles of the pistol.
"Stuff!" he said, "you daren't kill people that fashion!" And he put his hands to the traces.
"Levasseur, take care what you are doing! Do you mean to take out the horses?"
"The horses are mine, and, when they are over-driven, I unharness them."
"Have you a wife and children?"
Again he looked up; the question struck him as an unusual one.
"Yes, I have a wife and four children—a boy and three girls."
"Well, then, Levasseur, let me warn you that, if you do not let the traces alone, the Republic will be obliged to grant a pension to your family."
He began to laugh and to grip the traces with both hands. I pressed the trigger, the cap exploded and the wad hit my man in the middle of his face. He believed he was killed and fell backwards, his face between his hands, half fainting. Before he had recovered from the shock and astonishment I had drawn off his boots, as Tom Thumb drew off the Ogre's, put them on my own legs, jumped astride the saddle-horse, and we set off at full gallop. Bard nearly fell into the floor of the carriage with laughing. When we had gone three or four hundred yards, I turned round, though I still kept on whipping the horses, and I saw old Levasseur had sat up and begun to collect his senses. A tiny hill we were ascending soon hid him from my sight. I had still nearly a league and a half to make, but I caught up the lost time and did it in seventeen minutes. I reached the post at Levignan with a grand flourish of whips, and, when I pulled the horses up, two persons appeared on the threshold. One was the posting-master, M. Labbé, himself; the other my old friend Cartier, the timber-merchant. Both recognised me at the same time.
"Why; you, my boy!" said Labbé. "Things have gone badly with you then if you have come down to being a postillion?"