“I will just go and see first whether he breathes yet,” he mumbled to himself, leaving carelessly the shelter of his tree.  This move was immediately perceived by the resourceful General D’Hubert.  He concluded it to be another shift, but 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 at what had become of the other, was taken unawares so completely that the first warning of 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 thoughtlessly, leaving the pistols on the ground.  The irresistible instinct of an average man (unless totally paralyzed by discomfiture) would have been to stoop for his weapons, exposing himself 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.  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, defended and developed in many discussions, had settled into one of the stock notions of his brain, had become a part of his mental individuality.  Whether it had gone so inconceivably deep as to affect the dictates of his instinct, or simply because, as he himself declared afterwards, 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 the pistol-shot, he reappeared on the other side of the tree face to face with General Feraud.  This last, 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.

“Not missed!” he croaked, hoarsely, from the depths of a dry throat.

This sinister sound loosened the spell that had fallen on General D’Hubert’s senses.  “Yes, missed—­a bout portant,” he heard himself saying, almost before he had recovered the full command of his faculties.  The revulsion of feeling was accompanied by a gust of homicidal fury, resuming in its violence the accumulated resentment of a lifetime.  For years General D ’Hubert had been exasperated and humiliated by an atrocious absurdity imposed upon him by this man’s savage caprice.  Besides, General D’Hubert had been in this last instance too unwilling to confront death for the reaction of his anguish not to take the shape of a desire to kill.  “And I have my two shots to fire yet,” he added, pitilessly.