Maurice, although he had no acquaintance with that part of the frontier, declared that all they had to do was to pursue a straight course, whereon they resumed their way, moving among the trees in Indian file with the greatest circumspection, until they reached the edge of the thicket.  There, mindful of the injunction of the kind-hearted villager, they were about to turn to the left and take a short cut across the fields, but on coming to a road, bordered with a row of poplars on either side they beheld directly in their path the watch-fire of a Prussian detachment.  The bayonet of the sentry, pacing his beat, gleamed in the ruddy light, the men were finishing their soup and conversing; the fugitives stood not upon the order of their going, but plunged into the recesses of the wood again, in mortal terror lest they might be pursued.  They thought they heard the sound of voices, of footsteps on their trail, and thus for over an hour they wandered at random among the copses, until all idea of locality was obliterated from their brain; now racing like affrighted animals through the underbrush, again brought up all standing, the cold sweat trickling down their face, before a tree in which they beheld a Prussian.  And the end of it was that they again came out on the poplar-bordered road not more than ten paces from the sentry, and quite near the soldiers, who were toasting their toes in tranquil comfort.

“Hang the luck!” grumbled Jean.  “This must be an enchanted wood.”

This time, however, they had been heard.  The sound of snapping twigs and rolling stones betrayed them.  And as they did not answer the challenge of the sentry, but made off at the double-quick, the men seized their muskets and sent a shower of bullets crashing through the thicket, into which the fugitives had plunged incontinently.

“Nom de Dieu!” ejaculated Jean, with a stifled cry of pain.

He had received something that felt like the cut of a whip in the calf of his left leg, but the impact was so violent that it drove him up against a tree.

“Are you hurt?” Maurice anxiously inquired.

“Yes, and in the leg, worse luck!”

They both stood holding their breath and listening, in dread expectancy of hearing their pursuers clamoring at their heels; but the firing had ceased and nothing stirred amid the intense stillness that had again settled down upon the wood and the surrounding country.  It was evident that the Prussians had no inclination to beat up the thicket.

Jean, who was doing his best to keep on his feet; forced back a groan.  Maurice sustained him with his arm.

“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!”