The countryman seemed not to care a hang whether they went into the ditch or not. Fifty francs! He beat his horse as hard as he could with a stick fitted with a large copper ferule. The maddened beast galloped faster and faster. The cart leaped from one side of the road to the other, Marescal grew more and more terrified. [[155]]
“But it’s idiotic!” he shouted. “You’re going to upset us! Go slower, confound you! You’re mad, I tell you—mad! That’s it, you fool! Here we go!”
They went, indeed. The countryman clumsily pulled the wrong rein; the cart made a wilder jump and the whole outfit, cart, driver, passenger and load, plunged into the ditch in such a disastrous fashion that the countryman and Marescal found themselves on their stomachs with the cart on the top of them while the horse, entangled in the harness, with its heels in the air, beat a tattoo on the foot-board. Marescal presently discovered that none of his bones were broken. But the countryman was crushing him with his full weight. He tried to push him off. He could not.
Then he heard a kindly voice murmur in his ear: “Could you oblige me with a light, Rudolph?”
Marescal felt his body chill from head to foot. Death and only death could produce that impression of limbs already stiff and cold that nothing would ever warm again.
He muttered through chattering teeth: “The man of the express!”
“The man of the express, the very man,” echoed the voice at his ear-hole.
“The man of the terrace!” moaned Marescal.
“Quite right—the man of the express, the man of the terrace—and also the man of Monte Carlo and the man [[156]]of Boulevard Haussmann and the murderer of the two brothers Loubeaux and the accomplice of Aurelie, and the navigator of the boat and the driver of the cart. That gives you plenty of warriors to fight, old chap; and I venture to say that they can all hold their own.”
The horse had finished its drumming on the foot-board and scrambled to its feet and dragged the cart off them. Ralph sat up, on the small of the detective’s back, quietly drew off his big cloak, and wrapped it round the detective, so paralyzing his legs and arms. He caught the reins, pulled the cart towards him and, keeping a foot painfully on the detective’s back, stripped the horse of the traces and reins and bound Marescal with excessive tightness. Then he picked him up and carried him to the top of the high embankment into a thicket. He went down again, came back with a couple of straps from the harness, and fastened the detective by the neck and chest to the trunk of a birch.