hey were carried into Bourg on stretchers. One of them
died that same night, the other, three days after they reached Besancon.
The number of prisoners was therefore reduced to four; Morgan, who had
surrendered himself voluntarily and who was safe and sound, and Montbar,
Adler, and d'Assas, who were more or less wounded in the fight, though
none of them dangerously. These four aliases hid, as the reader will
remember, the real names of the Baron de Sainte-Hermine, the Comte de
Jayat, the Vicomte de Valensolle, and the Marquis de Ribier.

While the evidence was being taken against the four prisoners before
the military commission at Besancon, the time expired when under the
law such cases were tried by courts-martial. The prisoners became
accountable therefore to the civil tribunals. This made a great
difference to them, not only as to the penalty if convicted, but in the
mode of execution. Condemned by a court-martial, they would be shot;
condemned by the courts, they would be guillotined. Death by the first
was not infamous; death by the second was.

As soon as it appeared that their case was to be brought before a jury,
it belonged by law to the court of Bourg. Toward the end of March the
prisoners were therefore transferred from the prison of Besancon to that
of Bourg, and the first steps toward a trial were taken.

But here the prisoners adopted a line of defence that greatly
embarrassed the prosecuting officers. They declared themselves to be the
Baron de Sainte-Hermine, the Comte de Jayat, the Vicomte de Valensolle,
and the Marquis de Ribier, and to have no connection with the pillagers
of diligences, whose names were Morgan, Montbar, Adler, and d'Assas.
They acknowledged having belonged to armed bands; but these forces
belonged to the army of M. de Teyssonnet and were a ramification of the
army of Brittany intended to operate in the East and the Midi, while the
army of Brittany, which had just signed a peace, operated in the North.
They had waited only to hear of Cadoudal's surrender to do likewise, and
the despatch of the Breton leader was no doubt on its way to them when
they were attacked and captured.

It was difficult to disprove this. The diligences had invariably been
pillaged by masked, men, and, apart from Madame de Montrevel and Sir
John Tanlay, no one had ever seen the faces of the assailants.

The reader will recall those circumstances: Sir John, on the night they
had tried, condemned, and stabbed