After opening his eyes, he lay a while between sleeping and waking, with the sense of some unknown trouble heavy upon him. On a sudden a voice, a harsh, rasping voice, speaking a strange clipped jargon, roused him effectually. "He is a runaway!" the voice said, with two or three unnecessary oaths. "A crown to a penny on it, my bully-boys! Well, it is an ill-wind blows no one any good. Rouse up the little shaveling, will you? That is not the way! Here, lend it me."
The next moment the boy sat up, with a cry of pain, for a heavy porter's knot fell on his shin-bone and nearly broke it. He found himself confronted by three or four grinning ruffians, whose eyes glistened as they scanned his velvet clothes and the little silver buttons that fastened them. The man who had spoken before seemed to be the leader of the party: a filthy beggar with one arm and a hare-lip. "Ho! ho!" he chuckled; "so you can feel, M. le Marquis, can you! Flesh and blood like other folk. And doubtless with money in your pockets to pay for your night's lodging."
He hauled the child to him and passed his hands through his clothes. But he found nothing, and his face grew dark. "Morbleu!" he swore. "The little softy has brought nothing away with him!"
The other men, gathering round, glared at the boy hungrily. In the middle of the Forest of Bondy he could not have been more at their mercy than he was in this quiet corner of the market, where a velvet coat with silver buttons was as rare a sight as a piece of the true cross. Two or three houseless wretches looked on from their frowsy lairs under the stalls, but no one dreamed of interfering with the men in possession. As for the boy, he gazed at his captors stolidly; he was white, mute, apathetic.
"Plague, if I don't think the lad is a softy!" said one, staring at him.
"Not he!" replied the man who had hold of him. And roughly seizing the boy by the head with his huge hand, he forced up an eyelid with his finger as if to examine the eye. The boy uttered a cry of pain. "There!" said the ruffian, grinning with triumph. "He is all right. The question is, what shall we do with him?"
"There are his clothes," one muttered, eyeing the boy greedily.
"To be sure, there are always his clothes," was the answer. "It does not take an Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu to see that, gaby! And, of course, they would melt to the tune of something apiece! But maybe we can do better than that with him. He has run away. You don't find truffles on the dung-hill every day."
"Well," said his duller fellows, their eyes beginning to sparkle with greed, "what then, Bec de Lièvre?"
"If we take him home again, honest market porters, why should we not be rewarded? Eh, my bully-boys?"