“Good-morning, captain; good-morning, all of you,” he said. “Ah! the scoundrels, the wretches! Why, twenty of them came to surprise us.”
“Twenty, do you say?”
“Yes; there was a whole band of them, and that is why I disobeyed orders, captain, and fired on them, for they would have killed you all, and I preferred to stop them. That frightened them, and they did not venture to go farther than the crossroads. They were such cowards. Four of them shot at me at twenty yards, as if I had been a target, and then they slashed me with their swords. My arm was broken, so that I could only use my bayonet with one hand.”
“But why did you not call for help?”
“I took good care not to do that, for you would all have come; and you would neither have been able to defend me nor yourselves, being only five against twenty.”
“You know that we should not have allowed you to have been taken, poor old fellow.”
“I preferred to die by myself, don't you see! I did not want to bring you here, for it would have been a mere ambush.”
“Well, we will not talk about it any more. Do you feel rather easier?”
“No, I am suffocating. I know that I cannot live much longer. The brutes! They tied me to a tree, and beat me till I was half dead, and then they shook my broken arm; but I did not make a sound. I would rather have bitten my tongue out than have called out before them. Now I can tell what I am suffering and shed tears; it does one good. Thank you, my kind friends.”
“Poor Piedelot! But we will avenge you, you may be sure!”