Not a morning passed that Honoré failed to go and look after his piece, seeing to it that it was carefully dried and cleansed from the night dew, as if it had been a favorite animal that he was fearful might take cold, and there it was that Maurice found him, exercising his paternal supervision in the crisp morning air. “Ah, it’s you! I knew that the 106th was somewhere in the vicinity; I got a letter from Remilly yesterday and was intending to start out and hunt you up. Let’s go and have a glass of white wine.” For the sake of privacy he conducted his cousin to the little farmhouse that the soldiers had looted the day before, where the old peasant, undeterred by his losses and allured by the prospect of turning an honest penny, had tapped a cask of wine and set up a kind of public bar. He had extemporized a counter from a board rested on two empty barrels before the door of his house, and over it he dealt out his stock in trade at four sous a glass, assisted by the strapping young Alsatian whom he had taken into his service three days before. As Honoré was touching glasses with Maurice his eyes lighted on this man. He gazed at him a moment as if stupefied, then let slip a terrible oath. “_Tonnerre de Dieu!_ Goliah!” And he darted forward and would have caught him by the throat, but the peasant, foreseeing in his action a repetition of his yesterday’s experience, jumped quickly within the house and locked the door behind him. For a moment confusion reigned about the premises; soldiers came rushing up to see what was going on, while the quartermaster-sergeant shouted at the top of his voice: “Open the door, open the door, you confounded idiot! It is a spy, I tell you, a Prussian spy!” Maurice doubted no longer; there was no room for mistake now; the Alsatian was certainly the man whom he had seen arrested at the camp of Mülhausen and released because there was not evidence enough to hold him, and that man was Goliah, old Fouchard’s quondam assistant on his farm at Remilly. When finally the peasant opened his door the house was searched from top to bottom, but to no purpose; the bird had flown, the gawky Alsatian, the tow-headed, simple-faced lout whom General Bourgain-Desfeuilles had questioned the day before at dinner without learning anything and before whom, in the innocence of his heart, he had disclosed things that would have better been kept secret. It was evident enough that the scamp had made his escape by a back window which was found open, but the hunt that was immediately started throughout the village and its environs had no results; the fellow, big as he was, had vanished as utterly as a smoke-wreath dissolves upon the air. Maurice thought it best to take Honoré away, lest in his distracted state he might reveal to the spectators unpleasant family secrets which they had no concern to know.