The mares and heifers, the whole drove, in fact, stood with their heads in the air, staring eyes, and nostrils distended, watching the two men come down toward them, bending over their horses’ necks, reins flying, as if pursued by the tempest along the shores of the pond, whose waters were dancing and rippling in the wind.
Here and there the little tamarisks, bent almost double, seemed likewise to be fleeing from the storm. There were no more gnats or dragon-flies in the air. Above the Vaccarès the spray was flying. The mistral swept everything clean.
Two minutes later, powerless to control their enervated beasts, excited as they were by the struggle and the wind, the two adversaries rode at full speed through the drove.
Thereupon, inflamed by the sight of their two stallions racing madly by, alarmed at the sight of the waving spears, intoxicated by the wild wind that found a way into their bodies through their fiery nostrils, the mares neighed and reared and started off together on the gallop. The heifers followed. Hundreds of hoofs and cloven feet beat the ground with a noise like the roaring of a tempest, and the whole drove, lashed by the mistral, which howled behind them, biting them and urging them forward, rolled across the plain like a second Rhône. And while Bernard was saddling his horse in hot haste to overtake them, the two enemies galloped in the midst of the hurricane as if borne on by the stamping of eighty beasts, whose hoofs raised clouds of sand and showers of spray and mud in the wind that travelled faster than they!
At the head of this whirlwind, and still in the midst of it, Renaud succeeded in overtaking Rampal. When he was near enough to touch him, he selected the precise moment when his horse was raising his left hind foot, to strike him on the right hind-quarter. The right leg, just as it was about to strike the ground, bent double under the blow of a spear directed by a man riding at a gallop, and Rampal and his horse rolled over among the countless galloping hoofs that shook the earth.
Bulls and horses leaped over the two bodies lying there, man and beast, and when the drove, tired and subdued, came to a stop half a league farther on, Renaud, still riding Prince, was holding by the bridle his recaptured horse, bleeding only in the flank and at the nose.
Standing beside him, with rage in his heart, stained with mud and dust, his face bleeding and the skin torn from the palms of the hands, Rampal, red as fire, was occupied in rearranging his breeches and fastening his belt.
“Wait till next time, Renaud! After this you would expect a man to seek revenge, eh?”
But his shrill voice was drowned in the howling of the mistral.
“Give me back my saddle!” he shouted in a louder tone.