“Take it to the stable,” he muttered, “take the mare, Yvonne. It is not the first time she has saved my life.”
Yvonne in silence led the bleeding beast away. The girl who loved a cow could also understand why a soldier could love his horse.
André now seized the lantern and examined the dead men. Ha! two of them he did not know, but two were the spies of “The Gallows and the Three Crows,” the servants of the Duke de Pontchartrain and the Comte de Mont Rouge. He sat down on a fallen tree trunk, faint and sick. But the shock braced his dazed mind and he tugged out his watch. Ten minutes to twelve. Ten minutes! He could still be in time. His arm indeed was dripping with blood, but it was a mere flesh-wound, which he promptly bound up with his handkerchief, and by this time Yvonne had returned.
“Tell me what happened,” he commanded.
“I was sitting in the kitchen,” she said quietly, “when I heard a cry—a terrible cry. I seized a bludgeon and a lantern and rushed out. Mon Dieu! Monseigneur, it was horrible; you were fighting and falling. I struck as hard as I could, and then all was still. Monseigneur, I can see now, killed three of them, but the fourth I think I killed. See—there!”
Yvonne, with a finger to her lips, holding her petticoats off the floor, stole in, and behind her a stranger.
Her bludgeon was lying beside one of the dead men, whose head it had battered in. Yvonne began to cry at the sight.
“Will they hang me, Monseigneur?” she asked.
“Hang you! Good heavens! You have saved my life, my honour. They will not hang you unless they hang me, and they will not do that. Come, Yvonne, we must show these canaille where the superintendent of the police can see them to-morrow.”