“They are trying to kill me now,” he thought, shaking with fright. He gave himself up for dead. Profound silence reigned all round. Nothing more happened. He stooped fearfully to look and recognized his own stable fork lying on the ground. He remembered he had left it at noon leaning against the wall. His own foot had made it fall. He threw himself upon it greedily. “Here’s what I need,” he muttered feverishly. “I suppose that by now the lieutenant would think I am gone to bed.” He flattened himself upright against the wall with the fork held along his body like a grounded musket. The moon clearing the hill-top flooded suddenly the front of the house with its cold light, but he didn’t know it; he imagined himself still to be ambushed in the shadow and remained motionless, glaring at the path leading towards the cove. His teeth chattered with savage impatience. He was so plainly visible in his deathlike rigidity that Michel, coming up out of the ravine, stopped dead short, believing him an apparition not belonging to this earth. Scevola, on his side, noticed the moving shadow cast by a man--that man!--and charged forward without reflection, the prongs of the fork lowered like a bayonet. He didn’t shout. He came straight on, growling like a dog, and lunged headlong with his weapon. Michel, a primitive untroubled by anything so uncertain as intelligence, executed an instantaneous sideways leap with the precision of a wild animal; but he was enough of a man to become afterwards paralysed with astonishment. The impetus of the rush carried Scevola several yards down the hill, before he could turn round and assume an offensive attitude. Then the two adversaries recognized each other. The terrorist exclaimed: “Michel!” and Michel hastened to pick up a large stone from the ground. “Hey, you, Scevola,” he cried, not very loud but very threatening. “What are these tricks?... Keep away, or I will heave that piece of rock at your head, and I am good at that.” Scevola grounded the fork with a thud. “I didn’t recognize you,” he said. “That’s a story. Who did you think I was? Not the other! I haven’t got a bandaged head, have I?” Scevola began to scramble up. “What’s this?” he asked. “What head did you say?” “I say that if you come near I will knock you over with that stone,” answered Michel. “You aren’t to be trusted when the moon is full. Not recognize! There’s a silly excuse for flying at people like this. You haven’t got anything against me, have you?” “No,” said the ex-terrorist in a dubious tone and keeping a watchful eye on Michel, who was still holding the stone in his hand. “People have been saying for years that you are a kind of lunatic,” Michel criticized fearlessly, because the other’s discomfiture was evident enough to put heart into the timid hare. “If a fellow cannot come up now to get a snooze in the shed without being run at with a fork, well....”