Five hundred feet away, Bernard was looking on--not saying a word, for fear of Rampal, but praying fervently for Renaud, and he fancied that he was watching two champions standing on the long ladders in the prows of the jousting boats, with their lances held firmly under their right arms. Rampal's spear, being suddenly lowered too far by a false step of his horse, pricked the heel of Renaud's boot and grazed Prince's flank, whereupon he jumped violently aside, as if he were avoiding the horns of a heifer. Renaud's spear tore the sleeve of his enemy's blue shirt and carried away the piece. The horsemen met and passed each other. Rampal was the first to turn, and rode after Renaud, ready to strike him from behind, while he was struggling to stop Prince, who had acquired too much momentum; and Prince, hearing the other horse's hurried step, and feeling his hot breath behind him, furious at being held back, fearing that he would be overtaken, turned about so quickly and unexpectedly in his wrath, that Rampal took fright and turned again, but involuntarily. Renaud, finding that his pursuer had once more become a fugitive, gave Prince a free rein. The stallion was off like the wind. The horsemen sped along, pushed on by the gusts, the wind being now behind them. The mares and heifers, the whole drove, in fact, stood with their heads in the air, staring eyes, and nostrils distended, watching the two men come down toward them, bending over their horses' necks, reins flying, as if pursued by the tempest along the shores of the pond, whose waters were dancing and rippling in the wind. Here and there the little tamarisks, bent almost double, seemed likewise to be fleeing from the storm. There were no more gnats or dragon-flies in the air. Above the Vaccarès the spray was flying. The _mistral_ swept everything clean. Two minutes later, powerless to control their enervated beasts, excited as they were by the struggle and the wind, the two adversaries rode at full speed through the drove. Thereupon, inflamed by the sight of their two stallions racing madly by, alarmed at the sight of the waving spears, intoxicated by the wild wind that found a way into their bodies through their fiery nostrils, the mares neighed and reared and started off together on the gallop. The heifers followed. Hundreds of hoofs and cloven feet beat the ground with a noise like the roaring of a tempest, and the whole drove, lashed by the _mistral_, which howled behind them, biting them and urging them forward, rolled across the plain like a second Rhône. And while Bernard was saddling his horse in hot haste to overtake them, the two enemies galloped in the midst of the hurricane as if borne on by the stamping of eighty beasts, whose hoofs raised clouds of sand and showers of spray and mud in the wind that travelled faster than they!