"But what?" said Lagardere, sharply.
Cocardasse made an apologetic gesture. "Every man to his trade. We also are waiting for some one."
Lagardere raised his eyebrows. "Indeed, and that some one?"
The bravos looked at one another uneasily, trying to seem devil-may-care and failing wofully. Nobody appeared to want to speak. At last Passepoil spoke. "That some one is Louis de Nevers," he said, and wished heartily that he did not have to say it.
Lagardere at first appeared to be puzzled by the answer. Then the full meaning of it seemed to fall upon him like a blow, and his face blazed at the insult. "Nevers! You! Ah, this is an ambuscade, and I have sat at drink with assassins!"
Cocardasse protested: "Come, captain, come."
Lagardere’s only answer was to spring back clear of the nearest swordsmen and to draw his sword again. The bravos gathered together angrily about Staupitz, buzzing like irritated bees.
Lagardere flung his comely head back, and his bright eyes flamed with a royal rage. His words came quick and clear in his anger: "It was for this you sought to learn Nevers’s thrust, and I—Oh, it would make the gods laugh to think that I taught it to you! You have the best of the joke so far, excellent assassins, but if any one of you touches a hair of Nevers’s head he will find that the joke is two-edged, like my sword. If Nevers must die, it shall be in honorable battle and by my hands, but not by yours, while Lagardere lives."
Æsop commented, sneeringly: "Lagardere is not immortal."
Staupitz grunted, angrily: "Shall one man dictate to nine?" and made an appealing gesture to his comrades, inciting them against their censor.