"Yes, right well!"
"And there are people who can pay?"
"Catherine Lefèvre pays, and she it is who sends me," said Hullin.
Then Marc Divès rose, and in a solemn tone, and pointing toward the precipice, exclaimed, "She is a woman indeed—a woman as grand as that rock down there, the Oxenstein, the greatest I have ever seen in my life. I drink to her health. Drink also, Jean-Claude."
Hullin drank, then Hexe-Baizel.
"Now everything has been said," continued Divès; "but listen, Hullin. Do not believe that it will be an easy matter to check the enemy: all the hunters, all the sawyers, all the wood-cutters and carriers on the mountains will not be too many. I come from the other side of the Rhine. They are so many—those Russians, Austrians, Bavarians, Prussians, Cossacks, and Hussars—they are so many, that the earth is black with them. The villages cannot hold them: they camp on the plains, in the valleys, on the hills, in the towns, in the open air—they are to be found everywhere."
At that moment a shrill cry was heard.
"It is a buzzard chasing something," said Marc, stopping.
But just then a shadow came over the rock. A cloud of chaffinches cleared the abyss, and hundreds of buzzards and hawks fought above them in their rapid flight, uttering loud screams to terrify their prey, while the mass seemed stationary, so dense was it. The regular movement of these thousands of wings produced, in the silence, a sound like that of dead leaves blown in the wind.
"That is the departure of the chaffinches of the Ardennes," said Hullin.