“Turned up his toes!  By the god of war that was a shot!” he continued mentally.  “Got it through the head just where I aimed, staggered behind that tree, rolled over on his back and died.”

And he stared.  He stared, forgetting to move, almost awed, almost sorry.  But for nothing in the world would he have had it undone.  Such a shot!  Such a shot!  Rolled over on his back, and died!

For it was this helpless position, lying on the back, that shouted its sinister evidence at General Feraud.  He could not possibly imagine that it might have been deliberately assumed by a living man.  It was inconceivable.  It was beyond the range of sane supposition.  There was no possibility to guess the reason for it.  And it must be said that General D’Hubert’s turned-up feet looked thoroughly dead.  General Feraud expanded his lungs for a stentorian shout to his seconds, but from what he felt to be an excessive scrupulousness, refrained for a while.

“I will just go and see first whether he breathes yet,” he mumbled to himself, stepping out from behind his tree.  This was immediately perceived by the resourceful General D’Hubert.  He concluded it to be another shift.  When he lost the boots out of the field of the mirror, he became uneasy.  General Feraud had only stepped a little out of the line, but his adversary could not possibly have supposed him walking up with perfect unconcern.  General D’Hubert, beginning to wonder where the other had dodged to, was come upon so suddenly that the first warning he had of his danger consisted in the long, early-morning shadow of his enemy falling aslant on his outstretched legs.  He had not even heard a footfall on the soft ground between the trees!

It was too much even for his coolness.  He jumped up instinctively, leaving the pistols on the ground.  The irresistible instinct of most people (unless totally paralysed by discomfiture) would have been to stoop—­exposing themselves to the risk of being shot down in that position.  Instinct, of course, is irreflective.  It is its very definition.  But it may be an inquiry worth pursuing, whether in reflective mankind the mechanical promptings of instinct are not affected by the customary mode of thought.  Years ago, in his young days, Armand D’Hubert, the reflective promising officer, had emitted the opinion that in warfare one should “never cast back on the lines of a mistake.”  This idea afterward restated, defended, developed in many discussions, had settled into one of the stock notions of his brain, became a part of his mental individuality.  And whether it had gone so inconceivably deep as to affect the dictates of his instinct, or simply because, as he himself declared, he was “too scared to remember the confounded pistols,” the fact is that General D’Hubert never attempted to stoop for them.  Instead of going back on his mistake, he seized the rough trunk with both hands and swung himself behind it with such impetuosity that going right round in the very flash and report of a pistol shot, he reappeared on the other side of the tree face to face with General Feraud, who, completely unstrung by such a show of agility on the part of a dead man, was trembling yet.  A very faint mist of smoke hung before his face which had an extraordinary aspect as if the lower jaw had come unhinged.