Nicole, fearing for Dossonville, pressed forward for a nearer view. About the gates were a score of executioners, so saturated with blood that at first glance the butchers seemed more like the butchered. Eight or ten waited in two rows the arrival of the new victim. As many more leaned wearily against the wall with nodding heads. One stooped to light fresh torches.
Suddenly the gates disclosed to Nicole the flaring courtyard and the wild figure of a prisoner propelled to destruction by two guards. At first he marched to his death with firm tread; but all at once, with a horrid heave of his breast, he stretched out his hands before his face to hide the hideous doom. Shoved forward, his arms raised in the instinct of self-preservation, he suffered untold tortures: his arms, hacked to spouting stumps, received a dozen gashes, while the revolting body sought to strike back against the sting, until the last blow silenced the shriek on shriek that called on merciful death.
Two men dragged aside the half-naked corpse and flung it on the mound of bodies. At the shock of the new arrival there was a sudden settling and shifting in this inert mass, a quivering adjustment that gave the ghastly semblance of life, as though a hideous welcome of the dead to the dead. Geneviève, with throbbing pulses and dilated nostrils, shuddered and turned to Nicole. She was so rigid, so ghastly with the horror, that Geneviève seized her arm.
"Ah! ah! ah!"
At her clutch Nicole screamed in mortal dread, then burst into hysterical weeping. Geneviève put her arm around her and drew her away, through the morbid crowd, seeing dimly the baker's wife pressing feverishly forward to seize their place. Then Nicole, covering her eyes, began to scream:
"Take me away, away, away!"
But at every tenth step she stopped and struggled to go back, her glance seeking the caldron. The third time, to her horror, the gates opened once more, and, heavily borne between two guards, she saw the figure of Dossonville.