"Go, dog! go and tell your people that a woman has revenged herself upon you and has struck the horseman on his horse's face! Coward! Vile neat-herd! Go and tell it to your sweetheart! Go, tell her that when I struck you, you knew not what to do or say!" There was no wrath left in Renaud; he had no feeling but fear mingled with amazement. The woman's performance seemed to him in very truth surprising, diabolical. In coloring, bearing, expression, and audacity, she was the sorceress to the life. A strange terror took possession of him. Perhaps he would have gone astray gaily, without remorse, with any other than this ill-omened gipsy, who terrified him. He was especially alarmed for Livette. He felt that she, and he himself with her, were threatened by some mysterious, obscure disaster; and the thought of being unfaithful to her filled him with dismay, as the beginning of the end. He was afraid of himself; afraid, for Livette, of this unforeseen, inexplicable creature, who rose up before him, challenging him to contend with her, for what?--Thus, malignity and hatred brought the woman to him as love would not have done!--He was bewildered. He simply waited till his rein should be let go, ready to start off at a gallop, feeling no longer in his heart the wrath a man must feel in order to ride down any woman, though she were a witch, and trample her beneath his horse's feet, at the risk of killing her. But why was he no longer angry? Because his eyes, against his will, followed every movement of that body with its weird beauty,--the body of an enemy. "You would like to fly like a coward, would you?" she suddenly cried. "You shall not go until I choose!" Profiting by the horseman's open-mouthed stupor, she had seized with her teeth a hanging end of the lasso that was coiled about the horse's neck, and with the assistance of one hand--the other still holding the rein--had swiftly passed it about the nostrils and tied it in a cruel knot. With a fierce pull upon this instrument of torture, she held the beast fast just where she wished him to be. "You must wait until your comrades pass!" she said. "They must see a bull-tamer tamed by a woman!" "Upon my word," thought Renaud, "that would be, as she says, a very absurd thing!" And he drew his horse back a little, thinking he might release him, but the horse stretched out his head and neck, balked, dropped his tail, and stiffened his four legs, as if he were tied to a wall. The gipsy did not stir. She laughed, showing an unbroken set of small, white, pretty, formidable teeth. "Take care!" said Renaud at last, "I am going to ride my horse upon you!" "I defy you to do it!" she replied tranquilly. She saw with her unerring glance signs of confusion in the drover's eyes: the charm was working! Through a mist he now gazed upon this woman, whose captive he was, by virtue of a burning curiosity already closely akin to love. She smiled.