"Will you take yourself off, then?" cried Maheu to Catherine who had also begun to run again.
This time she did not even draw back, but turned her burning eyes on her father, and went on running.
Once more the mob ploughed through the flat plain. They were retracing their steps over the long straight paths, by the fields endlessly spread out. It was four o'clock; the sun which approached the horizon, lengthened the shadows of this horde with their furious gestures over the frozen soil.
They avoided Montsou, and farther on rejoined the Joiselle road; to spare the journey round Fourche-aux-Bœufs, they passed beneath the walls of Piolaine. The Grégoires had just gone out, having to visit a lawyer before going to dine with the Hennebeaus, where they would find Cécile. The estate seemed asleep, with its avenue of deserted limes, its kitchen garden and its orchard bared by the winter. Nothing was stirring in the house, and the closed windows were dulled by the warm steam within. Out of the profound silence an impression of good-natured comfort arose, the patriarchal sensation of good beds and a good table, the wise happiness of the proprietor's existence.
Without stopping, the band cast gloomy looks through the grating and at the length of protecting walls, bristling with broken bottles. The cry arose again:
"Bread! bread! bread!"
The dogs alone replied, by barking ferociously, a pair of Great Danes, with rough coats, who stood with open jaws. And behind the closed blind there were only the servants. Mélanie the cook and Honorine the housemaid, attracted by this cry, pale and perspiring with fear at seeing these savages go by. They fell on their knees, and thought themselves killed on hearing a single stone breaking a pane of a neighbouring window. It was a joke of Jeanlin's; he had manufactured a sling with a piece of cord, and had just sent a little passing greeting to the Grégoires. Already he was again blowing his horn, the band was lost in the distance, and the cry grew fainter:
"Bread! bread! bread!"
They arrived at Gaston-Marie in still greater numbers, more than two thousand five hundred madmen, breaking everything, sweeping away everything, with the force of a torrent which gains strength as it moves. The police had passed here an hour earlier, and had gone off towards Saint-Thomas, led astray by some peasants; in their haste they had not even taken the precaution of leaving a few men behind to guard the pit. In less than a quarter of an hour the fires were overturned, the boilers emptied, the buildings torn down and devastated. But it was the pump which they specially threatened. It was not enough to stop it in the last expiring breath of its steam; they threw themselves on it as on a living person whose life they required.
"The first blow is yours!" repeated Étienne, putting a hammer into Chaval's hand. "Come! you have sworn with the others!"