"Gaston, my comrade, the fifth down the line," he whispered, "has just seen two men prowling on the marsh; they are, without doubt, accomplices. Gaston has gone to tell the brigadier." He ran his hand carefully along the barrel of my carbine. "Monsieur must hold high," he explained in another whisper, "since monsieur is unaccustomed to the gun of war. It is this little machine here that does the trick." He bent his eyes close to the hind sight and screwed it up to its notch at one hundred and fifty metres.
I nodded my thanks, and he left me to my bread and wine and crept cautiously back to his ambush.
A black night was rapidly settling. Above me in the great unfathomable vault of sky not a star glimmered. Under the gloom of the approaching darkness the vast expanse of marsh to my left lay silent, desolate, and indistinct, save for its low edge of undulating sand dunes. Only the beach directly before me showed plainly, seemingly illumined by the breakers, that gleamed white like the bared teeth of a fighting line of wolves.
It was a sullen, cheerless sea, from which the air blew over me damp and raw; the only light visible being the intermittent flash from the distant lighthouse on Les Trois Loups, beyond the marsh.
One hour passed—two hours—during which I saw nothing alive and moving save a hare foraging timidly on the beach for his own rations. After a while he hopped back to his burrow in the thicket, a thicket of silence from which I knew at any moment might break forth a murderous fire. It grew colder and colder, I had to breathe lustily into the collar of my jersey to keep out the chill. I began to envy the hare snug in his burrow. Thus I held my vigil, and the night wore on.
Ah! my friend the curé! I mused. Was there ever such an indefatigable sportsman? Lucky curé! He was not a prisoner, neither had he been pressed into the customs patrol like a hired assassin. At that moment I knew Monsieur le Curé was snug in his duck-blind for the night, a long two miles from where I lay; warm, and comfortable, with every chance on such a night to kill a dozen fat mallards before his daylight mass. What would my friend Madame Alice de Bréville, and that whole-souled fellow Tanrade, think when I did not appear as I had promised, at madame's château, to dine at eight? Cold as I was, I could not help chuckling over the fact that it was no fault of mine.
I was a prisoner. Alice and Tanrade would dine together. It would be then a dinner for two. I have never known a woman as discreet as Alice. She had insisted that I dine with them. In Paris Alice might not have insisted, but in the lost village, with so many old women with nothing to talk about save other peoples' affairs! Lucky Tanrade!
I could see from where I lay the distant mass of trees screening her château, and picture to myself my two dear friends alone. Their chairs—now that my vacant one was the only witness—drawn close together; he holding her soft, responsive little hand between the soup and the fish, between the duck and the salad; then continuously over their dessert and Burgundy—she whom he had held close to his big heart that night after dinner in that once abandoned house of mine, when they had gone out together into my courtyard and disappeared in the shadows of the moonlight.
Dining alone! The very thing I had tried to bring about. But for the stern brigadier we should have been that wretched number—three—to-night at the château. Ah, you dear human children, are you conscious and grateful that I am lying out like a vagabond, a prisoner, that you may be alone?