But this was not all. He recognized that, once he quitted the comparative safety of the walled slope, his life would not be worth a moment's purchase if he were observed; he was resolved to part with that life as dearly as possible. To his sword, therefore, were now added the pistols in his belt, well charged and primed; likewise he had in his breast a dagger-knife, good either for stabbing or cutting.
"For all," he said to Laurent, "may be needed. The sword in close encounter with a number--they will be clever if they get beyond its point!--the pistols for use at a distance. To wit, when I am swinging over the chasm! For, there, a bullet would reach a man ere, perhaps, one from him can reach me. And for the knife--well, 'twill cut a lock away from an old door, or hack a rope in half with one lusty cut. Is't not so, my friend?"
"It is so," Laurent assented. Then he muttered, "You appal me! I never thought the man lived who knew not fear. Yet now I have found him."
But Andrew only laughed and bade him push on his way by the path that, even in the sodden, rimy darkness, the Lorrainer was well able to find.
At last they were on the brink of the chasm; they stood upon the coping of the wall of rock erected, doubtless, centuries ago by some De Bois-Vallée to prevent the flattened face of the slope from falling away and filling up the gap left between it and the house itself. The gap of twenty feet across which Andrew was now to pass.
Below, in front, nothing was visible; the mist rolling up from the plains obscured all. It was so profound that none who had not been there before could have imagined that, some yards away, though lower down, there stood the roof of a vast mansion; that, between the roof and their feet there was a gulf--a space--through which a step more, if taken by one who did not know every inch of the mountains, would hurl him to annihilation below.
"It is the safest moat--the most devilish!" Andrew whispered, "ever devised or thought of. How many have stumbled over this to death and destruction, I wonder, in the years that are gone and on such a night as this?"
"They are devils all, these De Bois-Vallées; devils all! Perhaps the Loup de Lorraine, the first of their race, foresaw the many stumbles that would happen here in the days that were to come."
"Maybe," said Andrew. "Well! by God's blessing I will not stumble nor fail in my passage. Now for the rope."
They wound it round the chestnut tree half a dozen times, knotting and making it fast at this end, so that by no chance could it slip and become uncoiled; they tugged singly and together at it until they were assured that it was as secure and fast as human hand could make it. Then they measured the length of what remained and judged that it was as nearly as possible what was desired.