He had no more sleep that night, but sat on a box in the corner of the kitchen, his blankets wrapped round him, torch and revolver ready. During that long watch he did some very practical thinking on the subject of doors and shutters, and the values of a good watch-dog. If there was to be a battle of wits among the ruins of Beaucourt many of the advantages would rest with Bibi; he could attack when he pleased; an eternal “standing to” to repel some chance raid was not a pleasant prospect.
“I might put the police on him,” Paul thought, and immediately saw himself in a legal tangle, and being handed over as a deserter to a corporal’s guard.
Before the first greyness of the dawn he lit the fire, made himself some tea, and then started the day’s work. It took him less than an hour to finish sheeting the roof covering the right half of the house, and he saw the sun come up through the beech trees of the Bois du Roi and flood the broken walls with yellow light. There was nothing to break the silence save the sound of his hammer, and in the calm of the dawn Brent found it difficult to believe that Louis Blanc existed.
He knocked off for breakfast, and then took a stroll up the Rue de Picardie. Not twenty yards from the café he came upon a rather amusing and significant proof of the impetuosity of Louis Blanc’s retreat, a pair of boots standing neatly, even demurely, in the middle of the street. Bibi had pulled off his boots here before making his attack, and Brent pictured him in his socks pedalling that bicycle of his back to Ste. Claire.
Paul was inclined to be elated over the finding of those boots, and to attach too triumphant a significance to this rather ridiculous detail. Louis Blanc had the soul of a “sneak-thief,” and the courage of a bully. Shot at, he evaporated, and Brent was tempted to believe that he had finished with Bibi.
But he kept to his plan, and began by closing the back door of the house with a barricade of iron sheets and timber backed by ammunition boxes filled with bricks. There were three ground-floor windows in the unroofed half of the house and Paul covered them with more sheets, driving the nails into the hard old mortar of the walls. He was nailing up the last sheet when he heard the sound of a car.
Old Durand had chosen a different road that morning, and had come by way of the Rue de Rosières. He pulled up outside the house, and Paul, standing there hammer in hand, saw Manon’s eyes fixed on the barricaded windows.
She gave a look of interrogation, frowning slightly.
“Just to keep out the wind,” Paul told her.
She did not believe him, and while Paul was talking to Durand she went in and discovered the blackened tiles in the back room, the charred shavings, and the scorched pile of floor boards.