"Ha! ha! ha!" he exclaimed, "I was sure that the beggars would stop around the waggon to drink my brandy, and that the match would have time to reach the powder! You think they are likely to follow us, do you? I tell you what, their arms and legs are by this time hanging to the branches of the fir-trees! Come on; and may Heaven do as much to all those who attempt to cross the Rhine!"
All the escort, the mountaineers, the doctor—everybody, had grown silent again. So many terrible emotions inspired each one with endless thought, quite different from those of ordinary life. They could not help saying to themselves: "What are men, thus to destroy, torment, devour, and ruin each other? What have they done, that they should hate each other so? And what can the ferocious spirit that excites them to it be, if it's not the devil himself?"
Divès and his men alone could behold such things unmoved, and while they galloped away, laughed and applauded themselves.
"For my part," said the tall smuggler, "I never saw such a capital joke. Ha! ha! ha! I shall never stop laughing at it, if I live for a thousand years."
Then all of a sudden a gloom came over him, and he exclaimed:
"For all that, this must be Yégof's work. We must be blind not to see that it is he who led the Germans to the Blutfeld. I should be sorry if he had met his end by the blowing up of my cart. I have something better in store for him. All I desire is, that he may keep all right until we chance to meet each other somewhere in the corner of a wood. If I have to wait a year, ten, twenty years, no matter, so it comes at last. The longer I shall have waited, the better my appetite will be: tit-bits are good cold, like boar's head cooked in white wine."
He said this in a laughing, good-humoured way, but those who knew him augured from it no good to Yégof.
In half an hour after they had all arrived before the farm of Bois-des-Chênes.