"Who dares to say he saw me do that?" cried the farmer.
"Three persons; among them the man from whom you borrowed the gun."
"How should I know the dog was yours? No, Monsieur Jean, upon my honor, I was ignorant of it."
Jean made a contemptuous gesture.
"Who," he continued, in the same calm but accusing voice, "who, having slipped into Pascal Picaut's house, sold to the Blues the secret he discovered there,--the secret of a sacred hospitality?"
"I bear testimony to that," said the deep voice of Pascal's widow, issuing from her silence and immobility.
The farmer shuddered and dared not defend himself.
"Whom have I constantly found," resumed Jean Oullier, "during the last four months, busy with shameful schemes, laying his plots and sheltering them under the name of his young master, proclaiming devotion and fidelity to him, and soiling the very name of those virtues by contact with his criminal intentions? Whom did I hear, on the Bouaimé moor, discussing the price of blood? Whom did I see weighing the gold offered him for the basest and most odious of treacheries? Who, I say, was that man, if not you?"
"I swear to you by all there is most sacred among men!" said Courtin, who still believed that Jean Oullier's principal grievance was the shot that wounded him. "I swear to you that I did not know you were in that luckless bush!"
"But I tell you I don't blame you for that! I have not said a word, I have not opened my lips to you about it! The list of your crimes is long enough without adding that!"