But he had not allowed for the steep descent.  One bullet stung the major in the thigh, the other so cruelly lacerated the horse of the gendarme on his right that it screamed, reared and fell sidewise with a crash into the brook.  The man, although encumbered by his heavy boots, contrived to disengage himself and stood up, furious at being unhorsed.

At the same moment, out of the reeds, much as though the disappeared horse had suffered a transformation, an old woman leaped up into the lane.  Her grey hair was disheveled and her pelisse was shredded by the brambles.  She ran to place herself before the horse in the chaise and the gendarmes, and screamed, with her eyes fastened on the girl in the vehicle: 

“Hold! do not shoot!  God is not willing!” But the major alone obeyed the injunction; the others, in the saddle and dismounted, were wild with rage and pain.  Their two firearms rang out as one, and the old woman had only time to cover the mark by drawing herself to her full height, with an effort unknown for thirty years.  Both bullets entered her chest, for she fell under the horse’s feet, as it stumbled and went down beside her.

As the vehicle abruptly came to a stop, quivering in every portion, Claudius clung to the frame of the hood to save himself from being cast out.  The girl was hurled against him, but she did not think of herself.  She thrust into his hand a revolver and whispered rapidly: 

“Quick! they are going to fire again!”

It was true; excepting, this time, the gendarmes had recourse to their carbines, the dismounted one having picked his up from the briars, and found the cap secure.  At that short range, the student would be a dead man if he awaited the double discharge.

Heated with the action, inhaling the acrid smell of gunpowder, the demon possessed him which at such moments hisses:  “Kill, kill, kill!” into a man’s ear.  The angelic demon there had supplied him with the weapon, and he fired three shots as rapidly as the mechanism would work.

The dismounted gendarme had come out on an unlucky day; a bullet in his neck laid him lifeless in the rushes beside the strangled horse; his comrade, pierced so that he bled internally, drew off to the roadside mechanically—­the image of despair; nothing more heartrending than the anguish on his convulsed visage and the increasingly hopeless expression.

Here was a double tragedy, but it was the major who, under the eyes of Fraulein von Vieradlers, was to furnish the comedy of the incident.  His horse took the bit in its teeth and ran away with him along the bank of the brook, threatening at any moment to lose footing and roll the two in the water.

“Victory!” said the girl, with a joy-flushed cheek, alighting and displaying no more compassion for the soldiers slain in doing their duty than for the chaise horse—­or the old woman beside its heaving carcass.

“She is dead,” remarked Claudius.  “But what did she say?  She spoke in Polish—­I understand it—­I caught the words, but they were not intelligible.”