The Wounded Name

by D. K. Broster

"Has he got it?" yelled Magloire, his eyes on the young man's face. "Has he got it? The luck would never stay with a traitor!"

A quiver went through L'Oiseleur from head to foot.

"No, he must have it!" cried the bewildered voices. "He always wears it. Show it us, L'Oiseleur!"

Aymar, white to the lips, retorted, "I shall show you nothing of the sort till Magloire Le Bihan is shot for insubordination!"

"We need not wait for any conditions of that kind!" sneered Magloire. "I will show you, since L'Oiseleur is so reluctant." And before Aymar guessed what he was about he had drawn his hunting knife and inserted it under his left sleeve.

Less because of what that action must inevitably bring to light, than because it was so intolerable to him to be held as he was and subjected to search, Aymar did once more try violently for a second or two to withdraw his arm from the iron grip. It was scarcely, therefore, Le Bihan's fault that the two-edged hunting knife cut rather more than it was intended to do. An instant later Magloire's powerful hands had made short work of the seams of coat and shirt alike; these were ripped asunder to the shoulder, and he was gazing delightedly at the bare arm he held captive.

He laughed. To him, as to L'Oiseleur himself, the amulet was a farce to overawe children, but the life of him who once wore it might be hanging, for all that, on the absence of that frail circlet of rushes. Aymar had never given the jartier a thought since it had broken in that blossomladen place which had witnessed alike his brief moments of happiness and the beginning of this black hour, but now . . . Was that going to undo him in the end—the foolish, half-fraudulent charm he had thought he need wear no longer?

He was for a moment barely conscious that Magloire was holding his naked arm upwards at full stretch so that all could see the talisman was gone. Moreover, down that arm was now running a thread of crimson—blood like any other man's. L'Oiseleur, of the charmed life, was no longer invulnerable . . . and naturally, since he no longer wore the charm.

The effect of the double revelation on those superstitious minds was paralyzing. The Eperviers began to huddle away in silence from the leader who had been so lucky because he wore the amulet—and who, by the same reasoning, was a definite source of ill-luck because he wore it no longer. The jartier had left him; therefore anything was possible. And it was May Day . . . when much magic was abroad. . . . Magloire read all this in the fierce, frightened faces; he nodded across to Hervé, made a sign, and his own immediate partisans closed round, so that the giant was able to let another man take his place, and be free to direct the course of what he had at last accomplished.

Aymar suffered the change of guardianship without protest. What was the use of fighting the situation any longer? If his men, his own men, could turn against him like this. . . . Yet Eveno would have been dead at his feet before a finger could have been laid on his leader . . . but he himself had sent Eveno to death. . . . Out of the bad dream that it had all become now he heard only de Fresne's voice, hot and incisive: