"You are lost--your body in this world, your soul in the next."
"Alas!" he wailed, "even though I have damned myself, will you too do the same thing by murdering me?"
His words were the signal for his doom.
They rushed at him as he lay there and plunged their knives into his body, one man exclaiming, "This for my mother, burned at Nîmes," another, "This for my father, broken at Anduse"; a third, "This for my brother, sent to the galley, 'Le Réquin'"; a fourth, "This for my sister, Fleurette, lying here."
When his nephew, Le Marquis du Chaila, afterward recovered his body from where they left it, it was pierced by fifty-two wounds, of which twenty-four were mortal.
"The beginning has been made," Pierre Esprit exclaimed. "There must be no backsliding. Henceforth each man's hand to guard each man's life. Now for the prior of St. Maurice, next for the priest of Frugéres. While for those who have been rescued from that man's clutches, away with them to the mountains and safety. Come, let us sing unto the Lord."
And up the slopes and pastures of the purple hills encircling the little village rose once more the chant of the army of Jehoshaphat.
Soon none were left in the blood-stained road but the pastor, Buscarlet, lying where he had fainted, and Martin Ashurst, white to the lips and endeavouring to arrange the dead man's limbs into something resembling humanity.