“It was me,” replied the old man, with the same brutish impassivity.
“You killed all of them?”
“Yes, all of them; it was me.”
“You alone?”
“Me alone.”
“Tell me how you set about it.”
This time the man seemed affected; the necessity of speaking at some length visibly embarrassed him.
“How do I know?” he stammered. “I just did it like it happened.”
“I warn you that you will have to tell me everything,” said the colonel. “So you will do well to make up your mind to it at once. How did you begin?”
The man flung an uneasy glance to his anxious family behind him. He hesitated for another instant, then suddenly made up his mind.
“I was coming home one night, maybe ten o’clock, the day after you got here. You and your men, you’d taken more than fifty crowns’ worth of my forage, with a cow and two sheep. I said to myself: ‘So many times as they take twenty crowns’ worth of stuff, so many times I’ll pay them out for it.’ And I’d other things on my mind, too; I’ll tell you about them later. And then I saw one of your troopers smoking his pipe in my ditch, behind my barn. I went and got down my scythe, and came up very softly behind him; he never heard a sound. And I cut off his head with one blow, with a single blow, like an ear of corn; he never so much as said ‘Oh!’ You’ve only to look in the pond: you’ll find him there in a coal sack, with a stone off the wall.
“I had my scheme. I took all his things, from boots to cap, and hid them in the cement-kiln in Martin wood, behind the yard.”
The old man was silent. The astounded officers gazed at one another. The questioning went on again; and this is what they learnt:
Once the murder had been done, the man had lived this idea: “Kill Prussians!” He hated them with the cunning, desperate hatred of a peasant at once avaricious and patriotic. He had his scheme, as he said. He waited for a few days.
He was left free to come and go, enter and depart at his will, so humble, submissive, and obliging had he shown himself to the conquerors. Every night he saw the vedettes go out; and he went out himself, one night, having heard the name of the village for which the troopers were bound, and having learnt, thanks to the constant presence of the soldiers, the few words of German he needed.
He walked out of his own farmyard, slipped into the wood, reached the cement-kiln, walked to the far end of the long gallery, and, finding the dead man’s clothes on the ground, he put them on.
Then he went prowling through the fields, crawling along, following the embankments so as to conceal himself, stopping to listen at the faintest sound, restless as a poacher.
When he judged that the time had come, he went near the road and hid in a hedge. He waited again. At last, at about midnight, he heard a horse’s hoof ring out on the hard road. He set his ear to the ground, to make sure that only one horseman was approaching; then made ready.
The Uhlan came up at a fast trot, carrying dispatches. His eyes were on the lookout, and his ears alert. When he was no more than ten paces distant, old Milon crawled across the road, groaning: “Hilfe! Hilfe! Help, help!” The horseman stopped, recognised a dismounted German, imagined that he was wounded, got off his horse, and went up to him, without suspecting anything. As he bent over the stranger, he received the long curved blade of the sabre clean through the stomach. He fell, without a death struggle, only quivering with a few final tremors.
Then the Norman, radiant with an old peasant’s silent pleasure, rose and, to please himself, cut the throat of the corpse. Then he dragged it to the ditch and threw it in.
The horse was quietly waiting for its master. Old Milon got into the saddle and galloped off across the plain.
An hour later he perceived two more Uhlans side by side, returning to their camp. He went straight towards them, again shouting: “Hilfe! Hilfe!” The Prussians let him come on, recognising the uniform, without any distrust. And the old man dashed between them like a cannonball, felling both, one with his sabre, the other with a revolver.
Then he cut the throats of the horses, German horses! Then he went quietly back to the cement-kiln and hid a horse at the end of the dark gallery. He took off his uniform, put on his mean clothes again, and, getting into bed, slept till morning.
For the next four days he did not go out, as he was waiting for the end of the inquiry which had been opened; but on the fifth day he went out again and killed two more soldiers by the same stratagem.
Thenceforward he never stopped. Every night he wandered away, prowling about at random, killing Prussians first in one place, then elsewhere, galloping over the deserted fields, in the moonlight, a lost Uhlan, a hunter of men. Then, his task over, leaving the bodies lying in the roads behind him, the old horseman returned to hide his horse and uniform in the cement-kiln.
At about midday he would go out, with an unconcerned air, to take oats and water to his mount, which remained in the underground passage. He fed the beast without stint, for he demanded a great deal of work from it.
But, on the previous night, one of the men he had attacked had been on his guard, and had slashed the old peasant’s face with his sabre.
Even so, he had killed both men! He had once more returned, hidden his horse,
