Part 37 (1/2)

”Why! cut the legs of their horses with our scythes. That'll bring them down; their muskets are not loaded, and when they find us ten to one against them they'll decamp. If the three villages all rose and killed two or three gendarmes, they couldn't guillotine the whole of us. They'd have to give way, as they did on the other side of Burgundy, where they sent a regiment. Bah! that regiment came back again, and the peasants cut the woods just as much as they ever did.”

”If we kill,” said Vaudoyer; ”it is better to kill one man; the question is, how to do it without danger and frighten those Arminacs so that they'll be driven out of the place.”

”Which one shall we kill?” asked Laroche.

”Michaud,” said Courtecuisse. ”Vaudoyer is right, he's perfectly right.

You'll see that when a keeper is sent to the shades there won't be one of them willing to stay even in broad daylight to watch us. Now they're there night and day,--demons!”

”Wherever one goes,” said old Mother Tonsard,--who was seventy-eight years old, and presented a parchment face honey-combed with the small-pox, lighted by a pair of green eyes, and framed with dirty-white hair, which escaped in strands from a red handkerchief,--”wherever one goes, there they are! they stop us, they open our bundles, and if there's a single branch, a single twig of a miserable hazel, they seize the whole bundle, and they say they'll arrest us. Ha, the villains!

there's no deceiving them; if they suspect you, you've got to undo the bundle. Dogs! all three are not worth a farthing! Yes, kill 'em, and it won't ruin France, I tell you.”

”Little Vatel is not so bad,” said Madame Tonsard.

”He!” said Laroche, ”he does his business, like the others; when there's a joke going he'll joke with you, but you are none the better with him for that. He's worse than the rest,--heartless to poor folks, like Michaud himself.”

”Michaud has got a pretty wife, though,” said Nicolas Tonsard.

”She's with young,” said the old woman; ”and if this thing goes on there'll be a queer kind of baptism for the little one when she calves.”

”Oh! those Arminacs!” cried Marie Tonsard; ”there's no laughing with them; and if you did, they'd threaten to arrest you.”

”You've tried your hand at cajoling them, have you?” said Courtecuisse.

”You may bet on that.”

”Well,” said Tonsard with a determined air, ”they are men like other men, and they can be got rid of.”

”But I tell you,” said Marie, continuing her topic, ”they won't be cajoled; I don't know what's the matter with them; that bully at the pavilion, he's married, but Vatel, Gaillard, and Steingel are not; they've not a woman belonging to them; indeed, there's not a woman in the place who would marry them.”

”Well, we shall see how things go at the harvest and the vintage,” said Tonsard.

”They can't stop the gleaning,” said the old woman.

”I don't know that,” remarked Madame Tonsard. ”Groison said that the mayor was going to publish a notice that no one should glean without a certificate of pauperism; and who's to give that certificate? Himself, of course. He won't give many, I tell you! And they say he is going to issue an order that no one shall enter the fields till the carts are all loaded.”

”Why, the fellow's a pestilence!” cried Tonsard, beside himself with rage.

”I heard that only yesterday,” said Madame Tonsard. ”I offered Groison a gla.s.s of brandy to get something out of him.”

”Groison! there's another lucky fellow!” said Vaudoyer, ”they've built him a house and given him a good wife, and he's got an income and clothes fit for a king. There was I, field-keeper for twenty years, and all I got was the rheumatism.”

”Yes, he's very lucky,” said G.o.dain, ”he owns property--”

”And we go without, like the fools that we are,” said Vaudoyer. ”Come, let's be off and find out what's going on at Conches; they are not so patient over there as we are.”

”Come on,” said Laroche, who was none too steady on his legs. ”If I don't exterminate one of two of those fellows may I lose my name.”

”You!” said Tonsard, ”you'd let them put the whole district in prison; but I--if they dare to touch my old mother, there's my gun and it never misses.”

”Well,” said Laroche to Vaudoyer, ”I tell you that if they make a single prisoner at Conches one gendarme shall fall.”