Joan said, tranquilly: 

“With your permission, I will go and destroy it myself.”

Ah, now I saw her idea, and was glad she had had the cleverness to invent it and the ability to keep her head cool and think of it in that tight place.  The officer replied: 

“You have it, Captain, and my thanks.  With you to do it, it will be well done; I could send another in your place, but not a better.”

They saluted, and we moved forward.  I breathed freer.  A dozen times I had imagined I heard the hoofbeats of the real Captain Raymond’s troop arriving behind us, and had been sitting on pins and needles all the while that that conversation was dragging along.  I breathed freer, but was still not comfortable, for Joan had given only the simple command, “Forward!” Consequently we moved in a walk.  Moved in a dead walk past a dim and lengthening column of enemies at our side.  The suspense was exhausting, yet it lasted but a short while, for when the enemy’s bugles sang the “Dismount!” Joan gave the word to trot, and that was a great relief to me.  She was always at herself, you see.  Before the command to dismount had been given, somebody might have wanted the countersign somewhere along that line if we came flying by at speed, but now wee seemed to be on our way to our allotted camping position, so we were allowed to pass unchallenged.  The further we went the more formidable was the strength revealed by the hostile force.  Perhaps it was only a hundred or two, but to me it seemed a thousand.  When we passed the last of these people I was thankful, and the deeper we plowed into the darkness beyond them the better I felt.  I came nearer and nearer to feeling good, for an hour; then we found the bridge still standing, and I felt entirely good.  We crossed it and destroyed it, and then I felt—­but I cannot describe what I felt.  One has to feel it himself in order to know what it is like.

We had expected to hear the rush of a pursuing force behind us, for we thought that the real Captain Raymond would arrive and suggest that perhaps the troop that had been mistaken for his belonged to the Virgin of Vaucouleurs; but he must have been delayed seriously, for when we resumed our march beyond the river there were no sounds behind us except those which the storm was furnishing.

I said that Joan had harvested a good many compliments intended for Captain Raymond, and that he would find nothing of a crop left but a dry stubble of reprimands when he got back, and a commander just in the humor to superintend the gathering of it in.

Joan said: 

“It will be as you say, no doubt; for the commander took a troop for granted, in the night and unchallenged, and would have camped without sending a force to destroy the bridge if he had been left unadvised, and none are so ready to find fault with others as those who do things worthy of blame themselves.”

The Sieur Bertrand was amused at Joan’s naive way of referring to her advice as if it had been a valuable present to a hostile leader who was saved by it from making a censurable blunder of omission, and then he went on to admire how ingeniously she had deceived that man and yet had not told him anything that was not the truth.  This troubled Joan, and she said: