'Quick, I must make haste to give them their bread,' muttered Silvine as she went off again, leaving him in the darkness.
Fists were hammering loudly on the kitchen door, whilst Prosper, annoyed at finding himself alone, was hesitating and parleying. He hardly liked to open the door when the master was away, for fear of any damage that might be done, the responsibility of which would have been thrown upon his shoulders. Luckily, however, just at that moment, old Fouchard's cart came down the sloping road, the clatter of the horse's trot being deadened by the snow. And thus it was the old fellow himself who received the men.
'Oh! all right, it's you three. What have you brought me in that barrow?'
Sambuc, with his spare bandit figure quite lost in a blue woollen blouse considerably too large for him, did not even hear Fouchard, such was his exasperation with Prosper, that honest brother of his, as he put it, who had only just made up his mind to unlock the door.
'I say,' shouted the Franc-tireur, 'do you take us for beggars that you leave us outside in such weather as this.'
Prosper, however, remained quite calm and shrugged his shoulders without answering a word; and whilst he went out to take the horse and cart to the stables it was again old Fouchard who intervened. 'So you've brought me two dead sheep,' said he, leaning over the barrow. 'It's lucky that it's freezing, or they wouldn't smell at all pleasant.'
At this, Cabasse and Ducat, Sambuc's two lieutenants who accompanied him on all his expeditions, began protesting. 'Oh!' said the first with his loud-mouthed Provençal vivacity, 'they haven't been dead more than three days. They came from the Raffins farm, where there's a lot of nasty illness among the animals.'
''Procumbit humi bos,' declaimed his comrade, the ex-process-server, who had lost caste through his immorality and who was addicted to quoting Latin.
Tossing his head, old Fouchard went on disparaging the merchandise, which, said he, was 'altogether too far gone.' However, on entering the kitchen with the three men, he ended by exclaiming: 'Well, well, they'll have to content themselves with it. It's lucky that they haven't a cutlet left at Raucourt. A man eats anything when he's hungry, eh?' And then, in reality quite delighted, he called to Silvine who was coming back after putting Charlot to bed: 'Bring some glasses, we'll drink a drop to Bismarck kicking the bucket.'
In this fashion did Fouchard keep up an intercourse with the Francs-tireurs of the Dieulet Woods who, for nearly three months now had been crawling out of their impenetrable thickets at nightfall, prowling along the roads, killing and rifling such Prussians as they were able to surprise, and falling back on the farms and levying contributions on the peasants whenever there was a scarcity of German 'game.' They were the terror of the villages, the more so as each time a convoy was attacked, each time a sentry was butchered, the German authorities avenged themselves on the neighbouring localities, accusing their inhabitants of connivance, fining them, carrying off their mayors as prisoners, and burning their homesteads. And if the peasants, despite all their longing to do so, failed to betray Sambuc and his band, it was simply through fear of being hit by a bullet at some turn of a pathway, in the event of the attempt to capture the Francs-tireurs resulting in failure.