"Comment?" "How shall I know? It was the fire, perhaps,--green wood or wet--it is no matter now.... I said to him, 'Pay attention, Henri; your wood makes too much smoke.' To me he reply I shall go to hell.... Well, there was too much smoke for me. I arise to search for wood more dry, when, crack!--they begin to shoot out there----" He waved a dirty hand toward the forest. "'Bon,' said I, 'Clinch, he have seen your damn smoke!' "'What shall I care?' he make reply, Henri Beck, to me. 'Clinch he shall shoot and be damn to him. I cook me my dejeuner all the same.' "I make representations to that Johnbull; he say to me that I am a frog, and other injuries, while he lay yet more wood on his sacre fire. "Then crack! crack! crack! and zing-gg!--whee-ee! come the big bullets of Clinch and his voyous yonder. "'Bon,' I say, 'me, I make my excuse to retire.' "Then Henri Beck he laugh and say, 'Hop it, frog!' And that is all he has find time to say, when crack! spat! Bien droit he has it--tenez, mon capitaine--here, over the left eye!... Like a beef surprise he go over, crash! thump! And like a beef that dies, the air bellows out from his big lungs----" Picquet looked down at the dead comrade in a sort of weary compassion for such stupidity. "--So he pass, this ros-biff goddam Johnbull.... Me, I roll him in there.... Je ne sais pas pourquoi.... Then I put out the fire and leave." Quintana let his sneering glance rest on the dead a moment, and his thin lip curled immemorial contempt for the Anglo-Saxon. Then he divested himself of the basket-pack which he had stolen from the Fry boy. "Alors," he said calmly, "it has been Mike Clinch who shoot my frien' Beck. Bien." He threw a cartridge into the breech of his rifle, adjusted his ammunition belt _en bandouliere_, carelessly. Then, in a quiet voice: "My frien' Picquet, the time has now arrive when it become ver' necessary that we go from here away. Donc--I shall now go kill me my frien' Mike Clinch." Picquet, unastonished, gave him a heavy, bovine look of inquiry. Quintana said softly: "Me, I have enough already of this damn woods. Why shall we starve here when there lies our path?" He pointed north; his arm remained outstretched for a while. "Clinch, he is there," growled Picquet. "Also our path, l'ami Henri.... And, behind us, they hunt us now with _dogs_." Picquet bared his big white teeth in fierce surprise. "Dogs?" he repeated with a sort of snarl. "That is how they now hunt us, my frien'--like they hunt the hare in the Cote d'Or.... Me, I shall now reconnoitre--_that_ way!" And he looked where he was pointing, into the north--with smouldering eyes. Then he turned calmly to Picquet: "An' you, l'ami?" "At orders, mon capitaine." "C'est bien. Venez." They walked leisurely forward with rifles shouldered, following the hard ridge out across a vast and flooded land where the bark of trees glimmered with wet mosses.