“You might make it five hundred with safety. You will never have to pay. The Orléanais is not long enough to give you time to catch Lisette.” It was Condé who spoke, but Richelieu made no answer, except that his cheek grew paler, and he drew a pistol from his holster. The men whom he had detached were gone, but the trooper whose horse had fallen stood a little apart on the roadside, staring stupidly at his beast, which lay there in mute suffering. Richelieu turned to the man and looked at him; and as I watched, helpless and tied, his face seemed transformed--his eyes burned, his lips were drawn back over his teeth like those of a snarling wolf. At last he spoke, in a voice that shook with rage: “Was it you, Le Brun, who let the prisoner escape?” “My horse was kicked, captain, and I--I fell,” stammered the man, and again came a laugh and a mocking cry from the Prince. “_Bon coq_, Coqueville!” The words seemed to drive the savage to madness. He glanced behind him with an oath, and then, lifting his pistol, pointed it at Le Brun. The man threw up his hands with a cry that changed to a sob, for there was a sharp report, and the wretch, spinning round, fell to the shot, all huddled in a heap beside his horse. Slowly the Monk put the smoking pistol back into his holster. His eye fell on the troopers near him, and they shrank at his look, cowed by the sullen ferocity of his glance. Then he called to one of the men: “Put this horse out of pain and follow us--march!” It may have been part of the iron discipline by which a ferocious soldiery was kept in order, but it was murder all the same--murder as foul and cruel as ever was wrought by a human tiger in the face of God’s day. And now I began to realize what manner of man this was whom men called The Monk, and the stories I had heard of him came back to me: How he was destined for the church; how his fierce and turbulent soul scorned the black robe and longed for the sword. He fled from his convent. Caraffa, the legate of the Holy See, relieved him of his vows, and no more reckless cavalier fought through the Italian war. He returned a merciless soldier, a fit instrument for the dark designs of those who sought to kill the faith with the sword. But the cup of his wickedness was brimming over, and the day of vengeance not far, when he, too, was to die by an assassin’s hand. I often wonder if any thought of poor Le Brun ever flashed before the glaring eyes of Richelieu, that bleak January night, when he lay poniarded and dying like a dog, on the pavement of the Rue des Lavandières.