CHAPTER VI
WE HUNT THE WILD BOAR
We reached home in the early afternoon. It was then that I got a clearer vision of De Marsac’s duplicity and of the game that he was playing. No sooner had we laid eyes upon my brother and the Count, when he began to tell of our adventure in the woods in the most excited fashion. He drew a most vivid picture of the danger I had been in. He painted himself in the rôle of my rescuer. His voice took on a high tremulous tone as though he too had suffered from the shock and were really alarmed at my nearness to death. Every now and then he turned to me to bear him out in this or that assertion but went rapidly on again before I had time to utter a sound. He clapped me on the back. He tugged me by the elbow. He looked beamingly into my face. To see and hear him you would have thought that I was lucky to be alive and you would have considered him the bravest man in the world.
At last with a fine frenzy he concluded.
“We must track this monster to his lair,” he shouted. “We must drive him to his death.”
I was like a fish floundering on dry land. To me this man was all fraud and froth. I looked appealingly towards my brother with the hope that he would see beneath it all.
The old Count rose and stretched himself.
“André,” he said with a sly wink, “it’ll be a fine day’s sport. What do you say?”
“We shall have everything ready by the morning, Sieur De Marsac,” he said dryly. Then he turned to the old Count and said, “We must drive this monster to its doom.”
With that he grinned and walked away.