Sambuc, lean and hungry as a robber and wrapped in the folds of a blue woolen blouse many times too large for him, did not even hear the farmer; he was storming angrily at Prosper, his honest brother, as he called him, who had only then made up his mind to unbar the door.

“Say, you! do you take us for beggars that you leave us standing in the cold in weather such as this?”

But Prosper did not trouble himself to make any other reply than was expressed in a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders, and while he was leading the horse off to the stable old Fouchard, bending over the wheelbarrow, again spoke up.

“So, it’s two dead sheep you’ve brought me.  It’s lucky it’s freezing weather, otherwise we should know what they are by the smell.”

Cabasse and Ducat, Sambuc’s two trusty henchmen, who accompanied him in all his expeditions, raised their voices in protest.

“Oh!” cried the first, with his loud-mouthed Provencal volubility, “they’ve only been dead three days.  They’re some of the animals that died on the Raffins farm, where the disease has been putting in its fine work of late.”

“Procumbit humi bos,” spouted the other, the ex-court officer whose excessive predilection for the ladies had got him into difficulties, and who was fond of airing his Latin on occasion.

Father Fouchard shook his head and continued to disparage their merchandise, declaring it was too “high.”  Finally he took the three men into the kitchen, where he concluded the business by saying: 

“After all, they’ll have to take it and make the best of it.  It comes just in season, for there’s not a cutlet left in Raucourt.  When a man’s hungry he’ll eat anything, won’t he?” And very well pleased at heart, he called to Silvine, who just then came in from putting Charlot to bed:  “Let’s have some glasses; we are going to drink to the downfall of old Bismarck.”

Fouchard maintained amicable relations with these francs-tireurs from Dieulet wood, who for some three months past had been emerging at nightfall from the fastnesses where they made their lurking place, killing and robbing a Prussian whenever they could steal upon him unawares, descending on the farms and plundering the peasants when there was a scarcity of the other kind of game.  They were the terror of all the villages in the vicinity, and the more so that every time a provision train was attacked or a sentry murdered the German authorities avenged themselves on the adjacent hamlets, the inhabitants of which they accused of abetting the outrages, inflicting heavy penalties on them, carrying off their mayors as prisoners, burning their poor hovels.  Nothing would have pleased the peasants more than to deliver Sambuc and his band to the enemy, and they were only deterred from doing so by their fear of being shot in the back at a turn in the road some night should their attempt fail of success.