“Tenez, M’sieu! Taisez-vous, donc, s’il vous plait! M’sieu, I entreat. I assure Monsieur it is no matter for laughter.”
“If you knew what it is to be free again, you’d laugh too,” declared Roy, and then his merriment passed into a big yawn. “But I’m awfully sleepy.”
“Deux minutes, and Monsieur shall rest. Monsieur is hungry.”
Monsieur undoubtedly was, though the craving to lie down was even greater than the craving to eat. Jean handed him a hunch of bread and cheese and a glass of milk; and while Roy was occupied with the same, he proceeded to array himself in holiday costume. He donned an old and shabby but once gorgeous coat, with standing collar and gay buttons, which, as he informed Roy, had many long years before been the best holiday coat of his esteemed grandfather.
“I go to the wedding of my niece,” he remarked, with so much satisfaction that, for a moment, Roy really thought he meant it. “Does Monsieur perceive? And Monsieur will be the boy—Joseph—who goes with me in the little cart.”
“But where is the little cart?”
“All in good time, M’sieu. Now we have for the moment to get rid of these things.”
Jean rolled the discarded clothes into a bundle, with which he disappeared out of the cottage for a few minutes. Roy conjectured that he might have buried it in the bushes, or under heaps of black rubbish, abundance of which lay ready to hand. Jean then took Roy into the outhouse, which was more than two-thirds full of heavy logs and faggots of wood—the winter supply—piled together.
“Am I to get underneath all that, Jean?”
“Oui, M’sieu. The gendarmes will not easily find you there.”