tting away as best we can, like poisoned rats; but by dint
of scrambling over these hedges and rocks--may the lightning blast
'em!--our compasses have got so rusty we are forced to take a rest. I
think those brigands are now somewhere near the old hovel where you see
that smoke."

"Good!" cried Gudin. "You," he added to Beau-Pied and his men, "fall
back towards the rocks through the fields, and join the line of
sentinels you'll find there. You can't go with us, because you are in
uniform. We mean to make an end of those curs now; the Gars is with
them. I can't stop to tell you more. To the right, march! and don't
administer any more shots to our own goatskins; you'll know ours by
their cravats, which they twist round their necks and don't tie."

Gudin left his two wounded men under the apple-tree, and marched towards
Galope-Chopine's cottage, which Beau-Pied had pointed out to him, the
smoke from the chimney serving as a guide.

While the young officer was thus closing in upon the Chouans, the little
detachment under Hulot had reached a point still parallel with that at
which Gudin had arrived. The old soldier, at the head of his men, was
silently gliding along the hedges with the ardor of a young man; he
jumped them from time to time actively enough, casting his wary eyes to
the heights and listening with the ear of a hunter to every noise. In
the third field to which he came he found a woman about thirty years
old, with bent back, hoeing the ground vigorously, while a small boy
with a sickle in his hand was knocking the hoarfrost from the rushes,
which he cut and laid in a heap. At the noise Hulot made in jumping
the hedge, the boy and his mother raised their heads. Hulot mistook
the young woman for an old one, naturally enough. Wrinkles, coming
long before their time, furrowed her face and neck; she was clothed so
grotesquely in a worn-out goatskin that if it had not been for a dirty
yellow petticoat, a distinctive mark of sex, Hulot would hardly have
known the gender she belonged to; for the meshes of her long black hair
were twisted up and hidden by a red worsted cap. The tatters of the
little boy did not cover him, but left his skin exposed.

"Ho! old woman!" called Hulot, in a low voice, approaching her, "where
is the Gars?"

The twenty men who accompanied Hulot now jumped the hedge.

"Hey! if you want the Gars you'll have to go back the way you came,"
said the woman, with a suspicious glance at the troop.