M. Ulrich thrust himself behind the trunk of a tree, understanding that a living being was coming up across the wood, and guessing who was going to appear. Indeed, making a hole in the black curtain of pine-trees, he now saw the head, the two forelegs, and soon the whole body of a horse. A white, hurried breath escaped from its nostrils and smoked in the darkness. The animal was making immense efforts to climb the steep slope. With straining muscles its forefeet doubled up like hooks, its belly all but on the ground, it advanced by jerks, but almost noiselessly, sinking into the moss and the thick mass of vegetation heaped on the soil, and hardly displacing anything but the leaves, which slipped one over the other with a murmur as of dropping water. It carried a pale-blue horseman bending over the animal's neck and shoulders, and holding his lance almost horizontally, as if an enemy were near. The breath of the man mingled with the breath of the horse in the cold night air. They advanced, showing by their bearing the difficulty of the upward struggle. Soon the traveller distinguished the yellow cord on the rider's tunic, the black boots beneath the dark breeches, the straight sword hanging at the saddle-bow, and he recognised a horseman of the regiment of Rhenish Hussars garrisoned at Strasburg; then nearer still he was able to distinguish on the black-and-white flag of the lance a yellow eagle, indicating a non-commissioned officer; he saw under the flat cap a beardless face, ruddy and perspiring, with red-brown, fierce and restless eyes, a face buffeted by the horse's mane in motion, and frequently turning to the right, and he named under his breath Gottfried Hamm, quartermaster in the Rhenish Hussars, and son of Hamm the police-constable of Obernai. The man passed by, brushing against the tree behind which M. Ulrich was hiding; the shadow of his body and of his horse stretched across the feet of the Alsatian and on to the neighbouring moss: they left in their wake an odour of harness and of perspiration.