the ground, as though
down there was what he loved best; but his eyes were turned to Dalgrothe
Mountain, which he could see through the open door.

"France!" cried the old soldier stoutly, and tossed off the liquor.

CHAPTER VIII

That night Valmond and his three new recruits, to whom Garotte the
limeburner had been added, met in the smithy and swore fealty to the
great cause. Lajeunesse, by virtue of his position in the parish, and
his former military experience, was made a captain, and the others
sergeants of companies yet unnamed and unformed. The limeburner was a
dry, thin man of no particular stature, who coughed a little between his
sentences, and had a habit, when not talking, of humming to himself,
as if in apology for his silence. This humming had no sort of tune or
purpose, and was but a vague musical sputtering. He almost perilled the
gravity of the oath they all took to Valmond by this idiosyncrasy. His
occupation gave him a lean, arid look; his hair was crisp and straight,
shooting out at all points, and it flew to meet his cap as if it were
alive. He was a genius after a fashion, too, and at all the feasts and
on national holidays he invented some new feature in the entertainments.
With an eye for the grotesque, he had formed a company of jovial blades,
called Kalathumpians, after the manner of the mimes of old times in his
beloved Dauphiny.

"All right, all right," he said, when Lagroin, in the half-lighted
blacksmith shop, asked him to swear allegiance and service. "'Brigadier,
vous avez raison,'" he added, quoting a well-known song. Then he hummed
a little and coughed. "We must have a show"--he hummed again--"we must
tickle 'em up a bit--touch 'em where they're silly with a fiddle and
fife-raddy dee dee, ra dee, ra dee, ra dee!" Then, to Valmond: "We gave
the fools who fought the Little Corporal sour apples in Dauphiny, my
dear!"

He followed this extraordinary speech with a plan for making an
ingenious coup for Valmond, when his Kalathumpians should parade the
streets on the evening of St. John the Baptist's Day.

With hands clasped the new recruits sang:

"When from the war we come,
Allons gai!
Oh, when we ride back home,
If we be spared that day,
Ma luronne lurette,
We'll laugh our scars away,
Ma luronne lure,
We'll lift the latch and stay,
Ma luronne lure."

The huge frame of the blacksmith