Dolores and Simon eagerly bent over the bag. With her bony fingers the old woman first lifted a heap of rags kept there for Dick's benefit; she then removed a few shiny red and yellow pebbles. Beneath these lay quite a little hoard of gold coins, of which she seized a generous handful, making them clink in the hollow of her hand. They were old coins of all sizes and bearing all sorts of heads. Simon exclaimed excitedly: "She comes from there! . . . She has been there!" And shaking the mad woman by the shoulders, he asked: "Where is it? How many hours have you been walking? Have you seen a party of men leading two prisoners, an old man and a girl?" But the madwoman picked up her dog and closed her bag. She refused to hear. At the most, as she moved away, she said, or rather sang to the air of a ballad which the dog accompanied with his barking: "Men on horseback. . . . They were galloping. . . . It was yesterday. . . . A girl with fair hair. . . ." Simon shrugged his shoulders: "She's wandering. Rolleston has no horses. . . ." "True," said Dolores, "but, all the same, Miss Bakefield's hair is fair." They were much astonished, a little way on, to find that Rolleston's trail branched off into another trail which came from France and which had been left by the trampling of many horses--a dozen, Dolores estimated--whose marks were less recent than the bandits' footprints. These were evidently the men on horseback whom the madwoman had seen. Dolores and Simon had only to follow the beaten track displayed before their eyes on the carpet of moist sand. The region of shells had come to an end. The plain was strewn with great, absolutely round rocks, formed by pebbles agglomerated in marl, huge balls polished by all the submarine currents and deep-sea tides. In the end they were packed so close together that they constituted an insuperable obstacle, which the horsemen and then Rolleston had wheeled round. When Simon and Dolores had passed it, they came to a wide depression of the ground, the bottom of which was reached by circular terraces. Down here were a few more of the round rocks. Amid these rocks lay a number of corpses. They counted five. They were the bodies of young men, smartly dressed and wearing boots and spurs. Four had been killed by bullets, the fifth by a stab in the back between the shoulders. Simon and Dolores looked at each other and then each continued in independent search. On the sand lay bridles and girth, two nosebags full of oats, half-emptied meat-tins, unrolled blankets and a spirit-stove. The victims' pockets had been ransacked. Nevertheless, Simon found in a waistcoat a sheet of paper bearing a list of ten names--Paul Cormier, Armand Darnaud, etc.--headed by this note: "Foret-d'Eu Hunt."