Breaking out into tears and almost fainting, but supported by Marguerite, Denise stretched out her hand to Jocelyn who covered it with kisses, while Marcel said to Caillet: "Now, the hour has sounded! To arms, Jacques Bonhomme! Peasants, artisans, townsmen, all for each! Each for all! To the happy issue of the good cause!"

"To the happy issue of the good cause!" rejoined the serf shaking with impatience. "To an evil issue the cause of the seigneurs and their clergy! Up, Jacques Bonhomme! War upon the castles!"

"And I," cried the student addressing Caillet while Marcel was giving his last instructions to Jocelyn, "I also will accompany you. I have shins of steel to tire out a horse. I shall ride ahead of Jocelyn's steed. To a happy issue the good cause! I represent the alliance of the University with the rustic folks. Rufin the Tankard-smasher was my name of peace; Rufin the Head-smasher becomes my name of war! And by the god Sylvanus, the genius of the fields and forests, I shall make havoc in this sylvan war! Forward! Forward!..."

A few minutes later William Caillet departed from Marcel's domicile accompanied by the champion and the student, all three bound for Beauvoisis.

PART III.
THE JACQUERIE.

CHAPTER I.
CAPTAIN GRIFFITH AND HIS CHAPLAIN.

The morning after William Caillet, Jocelyn the Champion and Rufin the Tankard-smasher left Paris, a band of English adventurers, commanded by Captain Griffith, and who for some time had been raiding the region of Beauvoisis, was marching under a balmy May sun in the direction of the village of Cramoisy. The men, about a hundred all told, and armed with weapons of different descriptions, marched in disorder with the exception of about fifty archers who carried on their shoulders their six-feet-long ash bows, a favorite weapon with the English, and which they handled with such dexterity that at the battle of Poitiers ten thousand of them were enough to put to rout the army of King John, consisting of more than forty thousand men commanded by the élite of the French nobility.

Several empty carts, hitched to horses and oxen and led by peasants who had been pressed into Captain Griffith's band under pain of death, were intended for the prospective booty. The English sold to the contiguous towns the proceeds of their thefts from the castles, as well as the droves of cattle that they took from the fields. In these towns the raiders were certain of purchasers for the sufficient reason that whoever refused was hanged on the spot. Captain Griffith affected a lordly generosity towards his customers in consenting to leave with them the spoils of his thieving exploits in exchange for moneys that it was in his power to rob them of. In his quality of the bastard of a great lord, the Duke of Norfolk, he prided himself of acting courteously, "as a true Englishman," according to his favorite phrase, and not scurvily like so many other leaders of mercenary bands.

Captain Griffith—a man in the full vigor of his age, robust and corpulent, and with hair and beard of a reddish blonde—rode at the head of his archers, the élites of his troop. Although in full armor, he had hung his casque on the pommel of his saddle, and now wore on his head a bonnet of fox-skin. Boldness, incontinence and a sort of cruel joviality stood out from the features of the Englishman that wore a rubicund tint from the potations and meats that he was in the habit of swallowing in enormous quantities. The morning air having sharpened his appetite, if ever it can be said to have been satisfied, the bastard of Norfolk was picking a ham, and from time to time lovingly resorted to a wine pouch that also hung from the pommel of his saddle. At his side rode his lieutenant, whom with impious mockery he styled his "Chaplain." Guilty of all the crimes on the calendar, Captain Griffith took, like Rolf the Norman pirate before him, a diabolical delight in all manner of sacrilege.