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“Can’t you walk?”

“I should say not!” He gave way to a fit of rage, he, always so self-contained. He clenched his fists, could have thumped himself. “God in Heaven, if this is not hard luck! to have one’s legs knocked from under him at the very time he is most in need of them! It’s too bad, too bad, by my soul it is! Go on, you, and put yourself in safety!”

But Maurice laughed quietly as he answered:

“That is silly talk!”

He took his friend’s arm and helped him along, for neither of them had any desire to linger there. When, laboriously and by dint of heroic effort, they had advanced some half-dozen paces further, they halted again with renewed alarm at beholding before them a house, standing at the margin of the wood, apparently a sort of farmhouse. Not a light was visible at any of the windows, the open courtyard gate yawned upon the dark and deserted dwelling. And when they plucked up their courage a little and ventured to enter the courtyard, great was their surprise to find a horse standing there with a saddle on his back, with nothing to indicate the why or wherefore of his being there. Perhaps it was the owner’s intention to return, perhaps he was lying behind a bush with a bullet in his brain. They never learned how it was.

But Maurice had conceived a new scheme, which appeared to afford him great satisfaction.

“See here, the frontier is too far away; we should never succeed in reaching it without a guide. What do you say to changing our plan and going to Uncle Fouchard’s, at Remilly? I am so well acquainted with every inch of the road that I’m sure I could take you there with my eyes bandaged. Don’t you think it’s a good idea, eh? I’ll put you on this horse, and I suppose Uncle Fouchard will grumble, but he’ll take us in.”

Before starting he wished to take a look at the injured leg. There were two orifices; the ball appeared to have entered the limb and passed out, fracturing the tibia in its course. The flow of blood had not been great; he did nothing more than bandage the upper part of the calf tightly with his handkerchief.

“Do you fly, and leave me here,” Jean said again.

“Hold your tongue; you are silly!”

When Jean was seated firmly in the saddle Maurice took the bridle and they made a start. It was somewhere about eleven o’clock, and he hoped to make the journey in three hours, even if they should be unable to proceed faster than a walk. A difficulty that he had not thought of until then, however, presented itself to his mind and for a moment filled him with consternation: how were they to cross the Meuse in order to get to the left bank? The bridge at Mouzon would certainly be guarded. At last he remembered that there was a ferry lower down the stream, at Villers, and trusting to luck to befriend him, he shaped his course for that village, striking across the meadows and tilled fields of the right bank. All went well enough at first; they had only to dodge a cavalry patrol which forced them to hide in the shadow of a wall and remain there half an hour. Then the rain began to come down in earnest and his progress became more laborious, compelled as he was to tramp through the sodden fields beside the horse, which fortunately showed itself to be a fine specimen of the equine race, and perfectly gentle. On reaching Villers he found that his trust in the blind goddess, Fortune, had not been misplaced; the ferryman, who, at that late hour, had just returned from setting a Bavarian officer across the river, took them at once and landed them on the other shore without delay or accident.

And it was not until they reached the village, where they narrowly escaped falling into the clutches of the pickets who were stationed along the entire length of the Remilly road, that their dangers and hardships really commenced; again they were obliged to take to the fields, feeling their way along blind paths and cart-tracks that could scarcely be discerned in the darkness. The most trivial obstacle sufficed to drive them a long way out of their course. They squeezed through hedges, scrambled down and up the steep banks of ditches, forced a passage for themselves through the densest thickets. Jean, in whom a low fever had developed under the drizzling rain, had sunk down crosswise on his saddle in a condition of semi-consciousness, holding on with both hands by the horse’s mane, while Maurice, who had slipped the bridle over his right arm, had to steady him by the legs to keep him from tumbling to the ground. For more than a league, for two long, weary hours that seemed like an eternity, did they toil onward in this fatiguing way; floundering, stumbling, slipping in such a manner that it seemed at every moment as if men and beast must land together in a heap at the bottom of some descent. The spectacle they presented was one of utter, abject misery, besplashed with mud, the horse trembling in every limb, the man upon his back a helpless mass, as if at his last gasp, the other, wild-eyed and pale as death, keeping his feet only by an effort of fraternal love. Day was breaking; it was not far from five o’clock when at last they came to Remilly.