'What is to be done now?'
'We must on to Compiègne, and announce to the people there that he is in the forest.'
'Sapristi! I wish I had my wooden shoes.'
'I wish we had not missed him; and all through old mother Picou's gossiping magpie tongue.'
Berthier listened as the two men retired, and then he slowly raised himself from the ditch into which he had rolled. Fagged, with his ankle strained, he felt unequal to a long flight; his only chance lay in being able to escape the vigilance of an aroused peasantry in some nook of the forest.
He therefore pursued the road till it entered the gloom of the trees, when he made for the first gap in the hedge, and dived into the pitch blackness beneath the foliage.
He groped his way along, resting occasionally, and then starting up and pushing forward in his fear. Sometimes the rush of birds rising from their perches among the boughs startled him, and sent the blood to his heart. A wild cat hissed and a night-hawk screamed. Some animal stole past him through the underwood; what it was, Berthier could not guess, but the rustle in the leaves produced by its movements filled him with fear.
He came out upon a path, and was frightened to see a phosphorescent line drawn along it. Wood-cutters had been removing old decayed timber during the day, and the traces were luminous at night.
Hearing a dog begin to bark furiously, he conjectured that he was approaching a farm, so he turned into the woods again. Taking the pole-star as his guide,—he could distinguish it occasionally through the branches overhead, he struck due east, wading through fern. Sometimes he caught his feet in the brambles, sometimes he stumbled over tree-roots or fallen boughs, and fell upon his face.
The ground rose and he mounted a hill, then descended into a valley, mounted another rise and went down into a hollow, where a sheet of water reflected the sky and the trees. In the surface he saw the lightening of the dawn reflected. He bathed his face and hands, and then crept under an oak with his eyes towards the east, waiting for morning to break and the sun to return.