wind. He had
already covered more than half a mile and was approaching the little
wood on the margin of the stream when he encountered Jean and Maurice,
who were on their way back to their resting-place for the night. He
addressed them an appealing, distressful cry as he passed; while they,
astounded by the wild hunt that went fleeting by, stood motionless
at the edge of a field, and thus it was that they beheld the ensuing
tragedy.

As luck would have it, Pache tripped over a stone and fell. In an
instant the others were on top of him--shouting, swearing, their passion
roused to such a pitch of frenzy that they were like wolves that had run
down their prey.

"Give me that," yelled Lapoulle, "or by G-d I'll kill you!"

And he had raised his fist again when Chouteau, taking from his pocket
the penknife with which he had slaughtered the horse and opening it,
placed it in his hand.

"Here, take it! the knife!"

But Jean meantime had come hurrying up, desirous to prevent the mischief
he saw brewing, losing his wits like the rest of them, indiscreetly
speaking of putting them all in the guardhouse; whereon Loubet, with an
ugly laugh, told him he must be a Prussian, since they had no longer any
commanders, and the Prussians were the only ones who issued orders.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" Lapoulle repeated, "will you give me that?"

Despite the terror that blanched his cheeks Pache hugged the bread more
closely to his bosom, with the obstinacy of the peasant who never cedes
a jot or tittle of that which is his.

"No!"

Then in a second all was over; the brute drove the knife into the
other's throat with such violence that the wretched man did not even
utter a cry. His arms relaxed, the bread fell to the ground, into the
pool of blood that had spurted from the wound.

At sight of the imbecile, uncalled-for murder, Maurice, who had until
then been a silent spectator of the scene, appeared as if stricken by
a sudden fit of madness. He raved and gesticulated, shaking his fist in
the face of the three men and calling them murderers, assassins, with a
violence that shook his frame from head to foot. But Lapoulle seemed
not even to hear him. Squatted on the ground beside the corpse, he was
devouring the bloodstained bread, an expression of stupid ferocity on
his face, with a loud grinding of his great jaws, while Chouteau and
Loubet, seeing him thus terrible in the gratification of his wild-beast
appetite, did not even dare clai