Enquiry of the administration of the Hotel de Commerce elicited the information that the Monk party had stopped there on the night of the storm, doubled back in the morning to visit Montpellier-le-Vieux, returning for midday dejeuner, and had then proceeded for Paris, just like any other well-behaved company of tourists.

There was nothing more to be done but go back to Nant and—­what made it even more disgusting—­nothing to be done there except ... wait...

Thoroughly disgruntled, more than half persuaded he had staked a claim for a mare’s-nest, he took the road in the heat of a day even more oppressive than its yesterday.  In the valley of the Dourbie the air was stagnant, lifeless.  After eight miles of it Duchemin was guilty of two mistakes of desperation.

In the first instance he paused in La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite and, tormented by thirst, refreshed himself at the auberge where the barouche and guide had been hired to convey the party from Montalais on to Montpellier.  The landlord remembered Duchemin and made believe he didn’t, serving the wayfarer with a surly grace the only drink he would admit he had to sell, an atrociously acid cider fit to render the last stage of thirst worse than the first.

Duchemin, however, thought it safer than the water of the place, when he had spied out the associations of the well.

He drank sitting on a bench outside the door of the auberge.  He could hear the voice of the landlord inside, grumbling and growling, to what purport he couldn’t determine.  But it wasn’t difficult to guess; and before Duchemin was finished he had testimony to the rightness of his surmise, finding himself the cynosure of more than a few pair of eyes set in the ill-favoured faces of natives of La Roque.

One gathered that the dead guide had enjoyed a fair amount of local popularity.

While Duchemin drank and smoked and pored over a pocket-map of the department, a lout of a lad shambled out of the auberge wearing a fixed scowl in no degree mitigated by the sight of the customer.  In the dooryard, which was also the stableyard, the boy caught and saddled a dreary animal, apparently a horse designed by a Gothic architect, mounted, and rode off in the direction of Nant.

Then Duchemin committed his second error of judgment, which consisted in thinking to find better and cooler air on the heights of the Causse Larzac, across the river, together with a shorter way to Nant—­indicated on the pocket-map as a by-road running in a tolerably direct line across the plateau—­than that which followed the windings of the stream.

Accordingly he crossed the Dourbie, toiled up a zig-zag path cut in the face of the frowning cliff, reached the top in a bath of sweat, and sat down to cool and breathe himself.

The view was splendid, almost worth the climb.  Duchemin could see for miles up and down the valley, a panorama wildly picturesque and limned like a rainbow.  Across the way La Roque-Sainte-Marguerite stood out prominently and with such definition in that clear air that Duchemin identified the figure of the landlord, standing in the door of the auberge with arms raised and elbows thrust out on a level with his eyes:  the pose of a man using field-glasses.