Old mother Chiquard had recognised the cause of the racket. The healthy life of the country had kept the old woman strong and active in spite of the eighty-three years that had passed over her head, and now she came to her door, armed with a broom, and hailed the tramp in angry, threatening tones.
“So it’s you, is it, you thief, you robber of the poor! It’s shocking, the way you spend your time in evil doing! What do you want now, pray?”
Slowly and sheepishly and with head bowed, Bouzille approached mother Chiquard, nervously looking out for a whack over the head with the broom the old lady held.
“Don’t be cross,” he pleaded when he could get in a word; “I want to come to an arrangement with you, mother Chiquard, if it can be done.”
“That’s all according,” said the old woman, eyeing the tramp with great mistrust; “I haven’t much faith in arrangements with you: rascals like you always manage to do honest folk.”
Mother Chiquard turned back into her cottage; it was no weather for her to stop out of doors, for a strong north wind was blowing, and that was bad for her rheumatism. Bouzille deliberately followed her inside and closed the door carefully behind him. Without ceremony he walked up to the hearth, where a scanty wood fire was burning, and put down his pack so as to be able to rub his hands more freely.
“Miserable weather, mother Chiquard!”
The obstinate old lady stuck to her one idea.
“If it isn’t miserable to steal my rabbit, this is the finest weather that ever I saw!”
“You make a lot of fuss about a trifle,” the tramp protested, “especially since you will be a lot the better by the arrangement I’m going to suggest.”
The notion calmed mother Chiquard a little, and she sat down on a form, while Bouzille took a seat upon the table.
“What do you mean?” the old woman enquired.
“Well,” said Bouzille, “I suppose your rabbit would have fetched a couple of shillings in the market; I’ve brought you two fowls that are worth quite eighteen-pence each, and if you will give me some dinner at twelve o’clock I will put in a good morning’s work for you.”
Mother Chiquard looked at the clock upon the wall; it was eight o’clock. The tramp’s proposal represented four hours’ work, which was not to be despised; but before striking the bargain she insisted on seeing the fowls. These were extracted from the pack; tied together by the feet, and half suffocated, the unfortunate creatures were not much to look at, but they would be cheap, which was worth considering.
“Where did you get these fowls?” mother Chiquard asked, more as a matter of form than anything else, for she was pretty sure they had not been honestly come by.
Bouzille put his finger to his lip.
“Hush!” he murmured gently; “that’s a secret between me and the poultry. Well, is it a go?” and he held out his hand to the old lady.
She hesitated a moment and then made up her mind.
“It’s a go,” she said, putting her horny fingers into the man’s hard palm. “You shall chop me some wood first, and then go down to the river for the rushes I have put in to soak; they must be well swollen by this time.”
Bouzille was glad to have made it up with mother Chiquard, and pleased at the prospect of a good dinner at midday; he opened the cottage door, and leisurely arranged a few logs within range of the axe with which he was going to split them; mother Chiquard began to throw down some grain to the skinny and famished fowls that fluttered round her.
“I thought you were in prison, Bouzille,” she said, “over stealing my rabbit, and also over that affair at the château of Beaulieu.”
“Oh, those are two quite different stories,” Bouzille replied. “You mustn’t mix them up together on any account. As for the château job, every tramp in the district has been run in: I was copped by M’sieu Morand the morning after the murder; he took me into the kitchen of the château and Mme. Louise gave me something to eat. There was another chap there with me, a man named François Paul who doesn’t belong to these parts; between you and me, I thought he was an evil-looking customer who might easily have been the murderer, but it doesn’t do to say that sort of thing, and I’m glad I held my tongue because they let him go. I heard no more about it, and five days later I went back to Brives to attend the funeral of the Marquise de Langrune. That was a ceremony if you like! The church all lighted up, and all the nobility from the neighbourhood present. I didn’t lose my time, for I knew all the gentlemen and ladies and took the best part of sixteen shillings, and the blind beggar who sits on the steps of the church called me all the names he could put his tongue to!”
The tramp’s story interested mother Chiquard mightily, but her former idea still dominated her mind.
“So they didn’t punish you for stealing my rabbit?”
“Well, they did and they didn’t,” said Bouzille, scratching his head. “M’sieu Morand, who is an old friend of mine, took me to the lockup at Saint-Jaury, and I was to have gone next morning to the court at Brives, where I know the sentence for stealing domestic animals is three weeks. That would have suited me all right just now, for the prison at Brives is quite new and very comfortable, but that same night Sergeant Doucet shoved another man into the clink with, me at Saint-Jaury, a raving lunatic who started smashing everything up, and tried
