Mademoiselle curtsied low to Count Saxe, and said sweetly, as if in amends for her pettishness:
“Good by, and a thousand thanks for your goodness, Monsieur de Saxe. My house of Capello is yours whenever you are in its neighborhood. Good by, Captain Babache. When my eyes rest on you again, you will be the welcomest sight in the world.”
If I had been a ready man, like François Marie Voltaire, for example, I could have replied to this kind speech with something handsome. But being only Babache, a Tatar prince from the Marais, all I could think of to say was:
“Good by, Mademoiselle; may God help you.”
I saw them depart and my heart was heavy. True, it would require some ingenuity on their part to get them into trouble, but I suspected both of them had talents as well as a taste in that line.
But now we had serious business of our own on hand. Beauvais brought us the three horses, which had been tethered in the courtyard. Everything was arranged; the firing kept up to the last, although our last was done with bits of broken nails and of silver pieces of money. At last the great dusky moon showed only a rim upon the far horizon, and then seemed suddenly engulfed in a great abyss of darkness.
At a signal, the drawbridge fell with a crash. We were already on horseback, and dashed across the bridge into the open place and toward the brick wall. Every man of ours was at our heels. The Russians were completely dazed. Half of them rushed into the courtyard only to find it empty. The rest ran hither and thither, afraid to fire in the darkness, and before they could rally, or could find out what we were really after, every man of us was mounted and away. We had a good twenty minutes’ start, for the noise among the Russians drowned the sound of our hoofbeats. We had only one street of the town to traverse before we struck the highway. The Russians had no inkling that we were making for Uzmaiz, and not half an hour from the time we started came a deluge of rain, the welcomest imaginable; for in that downpour the Russians lost us and never found us again. We fared on, knowing every foot of the way, for Count Saxe had made himself thoroughly familiar with this road to his island fortress. Bridges were down, and the roads were mere quagmires, but these were small difficulties to nineteen seasoned men, riding for their lives.
We bivouacked that night, and for four other nights, in those rocky and almost impassable woods with which 97 that country abounds, and which seem devised for the security of the hunted. It was easy enough to get food and forage, for we were well supplied with money. The argument of gold was supplemented by another argument of death, if the seller was disobliging; we had twenty good horse pistols, and their united reasoning never failed to convince. From the first day until the last but one of our flight, the weather was bad: torrents of rain, wild winds roaring, nature in a tumult night and day. At last the air grew soft, the sun shone, and on a heavenly August evening, after passing through a country green with deep-embosoming woods, and with sunny, verdant slopes and many trickling crystal waters, we came upon a great mirror of a lake, with a fair, wooded island in the midst of it; and that was our city of refuge—the lake and island of Uzmaiz.