conversation. Again the commander examined Marche-a-Terre, whose
impassible face still gave no sign. The conscripts, their ranks closed
up by an officer, now stood like a herd of cattle in the road, about a
hundred feet distant from the escort, which was drawn up in line of
battle. Behind them stood the rear-guard of soldiers and patriots,
picked men, commanded by Lieutenant Lebrun. Hulot cast his eyes over
this arrangement of his forces and looked again at the picket of men
posted in advance upon the road. Satisfied with what he saw he was
about to give the order to march, when the tricolor cockades of the
two soldiers he had sent to beat the woods to the left caught his eye;
he waited therefore till the two others, who had gone to the right,
should reappear.

"Perhaps the ball will open over there," he said to his officers,
pointing to the woods from which the two men did not emerge.

While the first two made their report Hulot's attention was distracted
momentarily from Marche-a-Terre. The Chouan at once sent his owl's-cry
to an apparently vast distance, and before the men who guarded him
could raise their muskets and take aim he had struck them a blow with
his whip which felled them, and rushed away. A terrible discharge of
fire-arms from the woods just above the place where the Chouan had
been sitting brought down six or eight soldiers. Marche-a-Terre, at
whom several men had fired without touching him, vanished into the
woods after climbing the slope with the agility of a wild-cat; as he
did so his sabots rolled into the ditch and his feet were seen to be
shod with the thick, hobnailed boots always worn by the Chouans.

At the first cries uttered by the Chouans, the conscripts sprang into
the woods to the right like a flock of birds taking flight at the