Part 25 (2/2)

”Hands off, you blackguards! Share that between you! Thirty thousand!”

The bundles of notes fell out of the leather wallet and were scattered over the ground. The tramps did not hesitate, but plumped down on their hands and knees, leaving the field to Simon.

Fifty yards away, Forsetta was running along the river, with his prey slung over his shoulder. Farther on, the two tramps posted on the other bank were punting themselves across on a raft which they had found. If Forsetta came up with them, it meant his safety.

”He won't get there,” Simon said to himself, measuring the distance with his eye.

With a quick movement, he s.n.a.t.c.hed the knife of one of his aggressors and set off at a run.

Forsetta, who believed him to be still struggling with the vagabonds, did not hurry. He had, so to speak, rolled Dolores round his neck, holding her legs, head and arms in front of him and crus.h.i.+ng them to his chest with his rifle and his brawny arms. He shouted to the two men on the raft, to stimulate their ardour:

”Here's the girl! She's my share. . . . You shall have all her jewels!”

The men warned him:

”Look out!”

He turned, saw Simon at twenty paces' distance and tried to throw Dolores to the ground with a heave of the shoulder, like an irksome burden. The girl fell, but she had so contrived matters, under cover of the suffocating blanket, that at the moment of falling she had a good grip on the barrel of the Indian's rifle; and in her fall she dragged him down with her.

The few seconds which Forsetta needed to recover his weapon were his undoing. Simon leapt upon him before he could take aim. He stumbled once more, received a dagger-thrust in the hip and went down on his knees, begging for mercy.

Simon released Dolores' bonds; then, addressing the two tramps who, terror-stricken when on the point of touching ground, were now trying to push off again:

”See to his wound,” he ordered. ”And there's the other Indian over there: he's probably alive. Look after him too, you shall have your lives.”

The tramps were scattering so rapidly in the distance, with Simon's bank-notes, that he gave up all idea of pursuing them.

Thus he remained master of the battle-field. Dead, wounded, or in fight, his adversaries were defeated. The extraordinary adventure was continuing as it were in a savage country and against the most unexpected background.

He was profoundly conscious of the incredible moments through which he was pa.s.sing, on the bed of the Channel, between France and England, in a region which was truly a land of death, crime, cunning and violence.

And he had triumphed!

He could not refrain from smiling and, leaning with both hands on Forsetta's rifle, he said to Dolores:

”The prairie! It's Fenimore Cooper's prairie! The Far West! It's all here: the attack by Sioux, the improvised blockhouse, the abduction, the fight, with the chief of the Pale-Faces coming out victorious!

She stood facing him, very erect. Her thin silk blouse had been torn in the struggle and hung in strips around her bosom. Simon added, in a tone of less a.s.surance:

”And here's the fair Indian.”

Was it emotion, or excessive fatigue after her protracted efforts?

Dolores staggered and seemed on the verge of fainting. He supported her, holding her in his arms:

”You're surely not wounded?” he said.

”No. . . . A pa.s.sing giddiness. . . . I have been badly frightened.

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