d livres should set her up
forever.

In the midst of their rattling came two soldiers, who ordered them
about, and with much blustering began searching here and there, and
chucking the maids under the chins, as I could tell by their little
bursts of laughter, and the "La M'sieu's!" which trickled through the
hay.

I am sure that one such little episode saved me. For I heard a soldier
just above me poking and tossing hay with uncomfortable vigour. But
presently the amorous hunter turned his thoughts elsewhere, and I was
left to myself, and to a late breakfast of parched beans and bread and
raw eggs, after which I lay and thought; and the sum of the thinking
was that I would stay where I was till the first wave of the hunt had
passed.

Near midnight of the second day I came out secretly from my
lurking-place, and faced straight for the St. Charles River. Finding it
at high water, I plunged in, with my knapsack and cloak on my head, and
made my way across, reaching the opposite shore safely. After going two
miles or so, I discovered friendly covert in the woods, where, in spite
of my cloak and dry cedar boughs wrapped round, I shivered as I lay
until the morning. When the sun came up, I drew out, that it might
dry me; after which I crawled back into my nest and fell into a broken
sleep. Many times during the day I heard the horns of my hunters, and
more than once voices near me. But I had crawled into the hollow of a
half-uprooted stump, and the cedar branches, which had been cut off a
day or two before, were a screen. I could see soldiers here and there,
armed and swaggering, and faces of peasants and shopkeepers whom I knew.

A function was being made of my escape; it was a hunting-feast, in which
women were as eager as their husbands and their brothers. There was
something devilish in it, when I came to think of it: a whole town
roused and abroad to hunt down one poor fugitive, whose only sin was,
in themselves, a virtue--loyalty to his country. I saw women armed with
sickles and iron forks, and lads bearing axes and hickory poles cut to a
point like a spear, while blunderbusses were in plenty. Now and again
a weapon was fired, and, to watch their motions and peepings, it might
have been thought I was a dragon, or that they all were hunting La
Jongleuse, their fabled witch, whose villainies, are they not told at
every fireside?

Often I shivered violently, and anon I was burning hot; my adventure had
given me a c