“Yes, every one. It looks as though the horseflesh a la neige was indigestible.”
Philip shuddered at the words. The night had grown twice as cold as before.
“Great heaven! to lose her when I have saved her life a score of times already.”
He shook the Countess, “Stephanie! Stephanie!” he cried.
She opened her eyes.
“We are saved, madame!”
“Saved!” she echoed, and fell back again.
The horses were harnessed after a fashion at last. The major held his sabre in his unwounded hand, took the reins in the other, saw to his pistols, and sprang on one of the horses, while the grenadier mounted the other. The old sentinel had been pushed into the carriage, and lay across the knees of the general and the Countess; his feet were frozen. Urged on by blows from the flat of the sabre, the horses dragged the carriage at a mad gallop down to the plain, where endless difficulties awaited them. Before long it became almost impossible to advance without crushing sleeping men, women, and even children at every step, all of whom declined to stir when the grenadier awakened them. In vain M. de Sucy looked for the track that the rearguard had cut through this dense crowd of human beings; there was no more sign of their passage than the wake of a ship in the sea. The horses could only move at a foot-pace, and were stopped most frequently by soldiers, who threatened to kill them.
“Do you mean to get there?” asked the grenadier.
“Yes, if it costs every drop of blood in my body! if it costs the whole world!” the major answered.