"I think it is impossible," said Oullier, showing his ankle, now swelled to the size of a man's head, and his torn hands and face. "Besides, I am not badly off here; you passed close by these bushes and did not suspect they hid a man."
"Yes, but a dog might pass and smell you out, just as mine did. Remember, my Jean, the war is over, and the days of denunciation and vengeance will begin, if they have not already begun."
"Bah!" said Jean Oullier, "we must leave something for the good God to do."
The widow was no less of a believer than the old Chouan. She gave him a piece of bread, cut an armful of ferns with which she made him a bed, and then, after carefully raising the branches of the briers and brambles about him, and satisfying herself that the eye of no passer would detect him, she departed, exhorting him to patience.
Jean Oullier settled himself as comfortably as he could, offered a fervent thanksgiving to the Lord, munched his bread, and presently went to sleep in that heavy sleep which follows great prostration.
He must have been lying there several hours when the sound of voices woke him. In the species of somnolence which followed the state of torpor he had been in, he fancied he heard the name of his young mistresses; suspicious as all men of his stamp are in the matter of their affections, he fancied some danger must be threatening either Bertha or Mary, and the thought was like a lever, which lifted in a second the torpor of his mind. He rose on his elbow, gently moved the brambles which made a thick rampart before him, and looked through them into the road.
It was dark, but not dark enough to prevent him from seeing the outline of two men who were sitting on a fallen tree on the other side of the road.
"Why didn't you continue to follow her, as you recognized her?" said one of them whom, from his strong German accent, Jean Oullier judged to be a stranger in these regions.
"Ha! damn it!" said the other. "She-wolf as she is, I never thought her so wily; but she gave me the slip, fool that I was."
"You might have been certain that the one we were after was in that group of peasant-women, and that Mary de Souday only stayed behind to meet and detain you."