Amanieu, the sulky man, was very angry at being fixed upon to make one of a party that would incur ridicule and expose him to the jeers of his fellows.
Le Gros Guillem now interfered. "If my daughter has said you are to attend, and I consent, you go. Guard her well."
Amanieu murmured no more. There was no insubordination in a Company.
The serving-men of the Tarde brothers were dismissed, and then Noémi prepared to depart along with her new attendants. Her father asked no further questions. The horses were brought from a stable cut in the rocks. They were nimble and sure of footing. Access to the stable was only to be had by a drawbridge let fall over a chasm, and from the further side of the gap a narrow track descended rapidly to the bottom of the valley.
At Noémi's request the men had drawn on jackets that concealed their red crosses, and no one seeing the little party would have conjectured that the girl was attended by some of the greatest ruffians and cut-throats in the country. She knew the character of the men, but was not afraid. The fear of her father entertained by all the band, and the discipline maintained in the Company, would prevent them from doing her harm.
Guillem was a man of few words, but of decision in action. The look of his pale eyes was enough, as he sent the men with Noémi, to take from them any spirit of insolence or rebellion had they entertained it. They knew without more words than the three uttered by Guillem, that if she came to harm through them, by their neglect, in any way, he was the man to put them to death by slow and horrible torture. They had seen that done once on a comrade who had disregarded a half-expressed order. He had been roasted over a slow fire.
The two men asked no questions when Noémi took the road to Sarlat, and along the road she did not speak with them. At Sarlat she bade them hold back while she went on alone and on foot to make an inquiry. Apparently satisfied at what she had learnt, she returned to the men, remounted her horse, and said, "Forward!"
She rode along the way to La Roque, a little ahead of the two men. The day was closing in. It would be dark by the time they reached her home.
Presently they came to a long and tedious ascent. The way had been at one time paved, but had not been repaired for a century. It ran up a hog's back or hill, through coppice that was cut every fourteen years for the making of charcoal, direct to the point where was the Devil's Table.
She halted, and turned to her followers; and they drew rein.