The Southern landscape was vivid in the hot sunshine of the late autumn; they left clouds of dust behind them as the car raced along to overtake the car of the "Redeemer." They passed the spacious vineyards, where the grapes grew like stunted hop-fields, twining round their little sticks; they sped through avenues of poplars, and almond trees and ilex; through villages where old women cheered and pointed down the long road.
"We're catching him up," Bouvier grunted. "They must have heard the news of his coming somehow."
A bend in the road, and a bridge with the blue river running beneath its arches; farmhouses and boys driving cattle home; children swinging on a gate, and old men plodding towards the sunset, on sticks that could never straighten their bent backs: the country came at them and receded from them in a succession of pictures framed in the hood of their car. Vineyards, and again vineyards, with the ungathered grapes withering in the sun, and people crying to them, "He's come back: the brave fellow."
As the road led nearer to Argelliers they overtook yellow coaches, full of people, and country carts swinging along. The drivers pointed their whips ahead, and shouted something, but the words were lost in the rush of the wind as the car rushed by them.
"The whole countryside seems to know that he's escaped. There'll be thousands in the Market Place," Bouvier said.
"It'll be a fine story," Humphrey agreed. "Those other fellows must have missed it." He was drunk with the excitement and the happiness of hunting a quarry.
They came to the Market Place of Argelliers, and the sight amazed him.
Left and right the people crushed together—a rectangular pattern of humanity. People of all ages had been drawn there by the magnetism of this man who had stirred up the South to revolt. The caps and dresses of the women and girls gave touches of colour to the sombre crowd of men, and, as he stood up in the motor-car for a better view, he saw row upon row of pink, upturned faces, parted, eager lips, and eyes that strained against the sunshine to see the black-clad figure of a man standing on the low roof of the People's Committee. Boys had climbed the trees round the Market Place—their gaping faces shone from the dark branches; and on the outskirts of the vast crowd men and women stood up in carts and waggonettes—horses had been harnessed to anything that ran on wheels.
There was not a soldier in sight. The sun shone fiercely on the Market Place of Argelliers, where two thousand people were thinking of their wrongs. And the man on the roof talked to them. His voice, strong and sonorous, came to them urging them to be of good cheer. They flung back at him cries of encouragement, and called him by name.