ger
parry. For my own part I never turned my head, but I touched Violette
with the spur for the first time and flew after the leader. That he
should leave his comrades and fly was proof enough that I should leave
mine and follow.

He had gained a couple of hundred paces, but the good little mare set
that right before we could have passed two milestones. It was in vain
that he spurred and thrashed like a gunner driver on a soft road. His
hat flew off with his exertions, and his bald head gleamed in the
moonshine. But do what he might, he still heard the rattle of the hoofs
growing louder and louder behind him. I could not have been twenty yards
from him, and the shadow head was touching the shadow haunch, when he
turned with a curse in his saddle and emptied both his pistols, one
after the other, into Violette.

I have been wounded myself so often that I have to stop and think before
I can tell you the exact number of times. I have been hit by musket
balls, by pistol bullets, and by bursting shells, besides being pierced
by bayonet, lance, sabre, and finally by a brad-awl, which was the most
painful of any. Yet out of all these injuries I have never known the
same deadly sickness as came over me when I felt the poor, silent,
patient creature, which I had come to love more than anything in the
world except my mother and the Emperor, reel and stagger beneath me. I
pulled my second pistol from my holster and fired point-blank between
the fellow's broad shoulders. He slashed his horse across the flank with
his whip, and for a moment I thought that I had missed him. But then on
the green of his chasseur jacket I saw an ever-widening black smudge,
and he began to sway in his saddle, very slightly at first, but more and
more with every bound, until at last over he went, with his foot caught
in the stirrup, and his shoulders thud-thud-thudding along the road,
until the drag was too much for the tired horse, and I closed my hand
upon the foam-spattered bridle-chain. As I pulled him up it eased the
stirrup leather, and the spurred heel clinked loudly as it fell.

'Your papers!' I cried, springing from my saddle. 'This instant!'

But even as I said, it, the huddle of the green body and the fantastic
sprawl of the limbs in the moonlight told me clearly enough that it was
all over with him. My bullet had passed through his heart, and it was
only his own iron will which had held him so long in the saddle. He had
lived hard, this M