"Tell me," Martin besought a bystander, big, brawny, and muscular, whom he found by his side and who, in spite of his splendidly developed manhood, wept, dashing the tears fiercely away from his eyes every moment. "Tell me what has happened. Tell me, I beg you."
"Murder! Butchery! A crime that will ring down the ages. Montrevel is burning three hundred helpless ones in Mercier's mill." Then he paused, casting his eyes over Martin's riding dress (stained now with the dust of his long rides) and upon his lace at breast and throat, smirched and dirty from continued wear. Paused to say: "What are you? a seigneur, I see. But of which side? The butchers or the slaughtered?"
"I am of the Reformed faith."
"Of Nîmes?" the man asked. "If so, God help you. Your mother or your babe may be burning there and you powerless to succour them. Montrevel's wolves surround the mill. He is there too, mad with wine and lust of blood. If there is any woman or child you love in Nîmes at this moment, God help you."
"She whom I love is not here. But, alas! can we do nothing? You wear a sword as I do? We can strike a blow----"
"Do! What can we do? There are two hundred dragoons there. What will our blades avail, though we were the best ferrailleurs in France?" Then suddenly he cried, "See, there is the slaughter-house!"
He spoke truly. The burning mill was before them.
A sight to freeze one's blood, to turn that blood to ice even beneath the sky of brass, even before the hot flames that darted forth, licking up, devouring all.
It stood, an ancient building of stone foundations and wooden superstructure. They said the former dated back to Cæsar's day, the latter to that of Charles le Bel, upon the banks of the canal as it would never stand again, since now it was nothing but a mass of burning fuel. Also a human hecatomb, there being within it the ashes of three hundred human beings whose bodies had that morning been consumed. And Martin blessed God that he had not been there to hear their piercing shrieks, their cries for mercy and their supplications.
Around the nearly destroyed mill, except on one side where it adjoined an inn, "La Rose de Provence," the front of which was all singed and scarred, he saw the executioners, the men who had been soldiers, fierce yet valiant, until this morning, but who were now worthy of no nobler name than that of cowardly murderers. Dragoons, Croatian Cravates, now Prance's most bloody swashbucklers with one exception, the Miquelets, those fierce Pyrenean tigers, as well as chevaux-légers and countless numbers of the milice. And near them, his sword drawn, his face inflamed with drink and fury, his breast a mass of ribbons and orders, was Montrevel upon his horse, a scandal to the bâton he had lately gained.