Renaud was off again.
Suddenly his eyes fell upon a low cabin with its rush-covered roof, shaped like a pyramid, or like a stack of straw, and surmounted, as they all are, by its wooden cross, bending back as if the mistral were gradually blowing it over.
The thought came to him: “Rampal is there! His horse must be tired. He retraced his steps a short distance without Bernard’s seeing him, and went into hiding there—hoping that I should be thrown off the scent and would ride by. Yes, he is surely there!”
Renaud turned about, and rode straight toward the cabin, keeping a sharp lookout; whereupon Rampal, who was really hidden there, watching his pursuer through the holes in the wall, rushed out, frightening an owl that flew away in dismay, and leaped upon his horse which was browsing in hobbles near by, but out of sight, at the bottom of a ditch.
The mistral, which comes like a cannon-ball when it makes up its mind to blow at that time of day, suddenly began to roar. Renaud had put his head down to meet the squall, so that he did not perceive this manœuvre of the enemy.
So it was that Rampal seemed suddenly to come up out of the ground, not twenty feet from Renaud, who was not taken by surprise, however, but rushed at him, brandishing his spear, for all the world like one of the knights of the time of Saint Louis, of whom our legends tell. (Aigues-Mortes was then in its prime.)
But Camargue is, as every one knows, the mother of the mistral—the vast sunny plain, with Crau, which, after sending the air up by dint of overheating it, is compelled to summon other air in order to breathe at all. And thereupon, down the Rhône valley, at the summons of the desert, comes a torrent of fresh air, which is the companion of the river, and is called the mistral. It roared through Renaud’s open vest as in the belly of a sail, and, taking Prince sidewise, kept him back a little. It was no easy matter to leap the ditch. That gave the advantage to Rampal, who was now trotting freely along, face to the wind.
The ditch was now between the two men, and Rampal’s only purpose in trotting along the edge of it was to limber up his horse’s legs. Renaud, abandoning the idea of crossing the ditch for the moment, decided to follow along on his side. The two horsemen rode thus for a few moments. Rampal had prudently protected his face from the mistral with a red silk handkerchief, the ends of which flapped about his neck.
Suddenly, taking advantage of a spot where the banks came somewhat nearer together, Renaud lifted his horse and landed on the other side of the ditch at the very instant that Rampal, having executed the same manœuvre in the opposite direction, landed on the side Renaud had left.
Renaud did not find a favorable spot for crossing at once, and Rampal gained upon him.