When Maurice reached his destination the artillerymen were already stirring and about to drink their coffee, and a quarrel had arisen between Adolphe, the forward driver, and Louis, the gunner, his mate.  For the entire three years that they had been “married,” in accordance with the custom which couples a driver with a gunner, they had lived happily together, with the one exception of meal-times.  Louis, an intelligent man and the better informed of the two, did not grumble at the airs of superiority that are affected by every mounted over every unmounted man:  he pitched the tent, made the soup, and did the chores, while Adolphe groomed his horses with the pride of a reigning potentate.  When the former, a little black, lean man, afflicted with an enormous appetite, rose in arms against the exactions of the latter, a big, burly fellow with huge blonde mustaches, who insisted on being waited on like a lord, then the fun began.  The subject matter of the dispute on the present morning was that Louis, who had made the coffee, accused Adolphe of having drunk it all.  It required some diplomacy to reconcile them.

Not a morning passed that Honore failed to go and look after his piece, seeing to it that it was carefully dried and cleansed from the night dew, as if it had been a favorite animal that he was fearful might take cold, and there it was that Maurice found him, exercising his paternal supervision in the crisp morning air.

“Ah, it’s you!  I knew that the 106th was somewhere in the vicinity; I got a letter from Remilly yesterday and was intending to start out and hunt you up.  Let’s go and have a glass of white wine.”

For the sake of privacy he conducted his cousin to the little farmhouse that the soldiers had looted the day before, where the old peasant, undeterred by his losses and allured by the prospect of turning an honest penny, had tapped a cask of wine and set up a kind of public bar.  He had extemporized a counter from a board rested on two empty barrels before the door of his house, and over it he dealt out his stock in trade at four sous a glass, assisted by the strapping young Alsatian whom he had taken into his service three days before.

As Honore was touching glasses with Maurice his eyes lighted on this man.  He gazed at him a moment as if stupefied, then let slip a terrible oath.

“Tonnerre de Dieu! Goliah!”

And he darted forward and would have caught him by the throat, but the peasant, foreseeing in his action a repetition of his yesterday’s experience, jumped quickly within the house and locked the door behind him.  For a moment confusion reigned about the premises; soldiers came rushing up to see what was going on, while the quartermaster-sergeant shouted at the top of his voice: 

“Open the door, open the door, you confounded idiot!  It is a spy, I tell you, a Prussian spy!”