“We need none,” Tignonville muttered impatiently.

“Yet many others need you,” La Tribe answered in a tone of rebuke.  “You are not aware that the man you follow bears a packet from the King for the hands of the magistrates of Angers?”

“Ha!  Does he?”

“Bidding them do at Angers as his Majesty has done in Paris?”

The men broke into cries of execration.  “But he shall not see Angers!” they swore.  “The blood that he has shed shall choke him by the way!  And as he would do to others it shall be done to him.”

La Tribe shuddered as he listened, as he looked.  Try as he would, the thirst of these men for vengeance appalled him.

“How?” he said.  “He has a score and more with him and you are only six.”

“Seven now,” Tignonville answered with a smile.

“True, but—­”

“And he lies to-night at La Fleche?  That is so?”

“It was his intention this morning.”

“At the old King’s Inn at the meeting of the great roads?”

“It was mentioned,” La Tribe admitted, with a reluctance he did not comprehend.  “But if the night be fair he is as like as not to lie in the fields.”

One of the men pointed to the sky.  A dark bank of cloud fresh risen from the ocean, and big with tempest, hung low in the west.

“See!  God will deliver him into our hands!” he cried.

Tignonville nodded.  “If he lie there,” he said, “He will.”  And then to one of his followers, as he dismounted, “Do you ride on,” he said, “and stand guard that we be not surprised.  And do you, Perrot, tell Monsieur.  Perrot here, as God wills it,” he added, with the faint smile which did not escape the minister’s eye, “married his wife from the great inn at La Fleche, and he knows the place.”

“None better,” the man growled.  He was a sullen, brooding knave, whose eyes when he looked up surprised by their savage fire.

La Tribe shook his head.  “I know it, too,” he said. “’Tis strong as a fortress, with a walled court, and all the windows look inwards.  The gates are closed an hour after sunset, no matter who is without.  If you think, M. de Tignonville, to take him there—­”

“Patience, Monsieur, you have not heard me,” Perrot interposed.  “I know it after another fashion.  Do you remember a rill of water which runs through the great yard and the stables?”

La Tribe nodded.

“Grated with iron at either end and no passage for so much as a dog?  You do?  Well, Monsieur, I have hunted rats there, and where the water passes under the wall is a culvert, a man’s height in length.  In it is a stone, one of those which frame the grating at the entrance, which a strong man can remove—­and the man is in!”

“Ay, in!  But where?” La Tribe asked, his eyebrows drawn together.