to suffer for a knave; and I did not wish to expose them to a fight.
Here is the Mauprat. Your duty, as you know, is to deliver him safe and
sound into the hands of justice. This other is dead."

"Monsieur, surrender!" said the sergeant of the gendarmes, laying his
hand on Leonard.

"Never shall a Mauprat drag his name into the dock of a police court,"
replied Leonard, with a sullen expression. "I surrender, but you will
get nothing but my skin."

And he allowed himself to be placed in a chair without making any
resistance.

But while they were preparing to bind him he said to the cure:

"Do me one last kindness, Father. Give me what is left in the flask; I
am dying of thirst and exhaustion."

The good cure handed him the flask, which he emptied at a draught. His
distorted face took on an expression of awful calm. He seemed absorbed,
stunned, incapable of resistance. But as soon as they were engaged
in binding his feet, he snatched a pistol from the belt of one of the
gendarmes and blew his brains out.

This frightful spectacle completely unnerved me. Sunk in a dull stupor,
no longer conscious of what was happening around me, I stood there as if
turned to stone, and it was only after some minutes that I realized
that I was the subject of a serious discussion between the police and
my hosts. One of the gendarmes declared that he recognised me as a
Hamstringer Mauprat. Patience declared that I was nothing but M. Hubert
de Mauprat's gamekeeper, in charge of his daughter. Annoyed at the
discussion, I was about to make myself known when I saw a ghost rise
by my side. It was Edmee. She had taken refuge between the wall and the
cure's poor frightened horse, which, with outstretched legs and eyes
of fire, made her a sort of rampart with its body. She was as pale as
death, and her lips were so compressed with horror that at first, in
spite of desperate efforts to speak, she was unable to express herself
otherwise than by signs. The sergeant, moved by her youth and her
painful situation, waited with deference until she could manage to make
herself understood. At last she persuaded them not to treat me as a
prisoner, but to take me with her to her father's chateau, where she
gave her word of honour that satisfactory explanations and guarantees
would be furnished on my account. The cure and the other witnesses,
having pledged their words to this, we set out all together, Edmee
on the sergeant's horse, he on an animal belon