On seeing the reinforcements arriving to help the widow, Thibault endeavoured to escape by the door that had been left open by the recruiting party, but just as he was running out, the good pig, that we saw taking its siesta in the sun, being roused out of its first sleep by all this hullabaloo, and thinking the farm people were after it, made a dash for its stye, and in so doing charged right against Thibault’s legs. The latter lost his balance, and went rolling over and over for a good ten paces in the dirt and slush. “Devil take you, you beast!” cried the shoe-maker, bruised by his fall, but even more furious at seeing his new clothes covered with mud. The wish was hardly out of his mouth, when the pig was suddenly taken with a fit of frenzy, and began rushing about the farm-yard like a mad animal, breaking, shattering, and turning over everything that came in its way. The farm hands, who had run to their mistress on hearing her cries, thought the pig’s behaviour was the cause of them--and started off in pursuit of the animal. But it eluded all their attempts to seize hold of it, knocking over boys and girls, as it had knocked Thibault over, until, at last, coming to where the mill was separated from the sluice by a wooden partition, it crashed through the latter as easily as if it were made of paper, threw itself under the mill wheel ... and disappeared as if sucked down by a whirlpool. The mistress of the mill had by this time recovered her speech. “Lay hold of Thibault!” she cried, for she had heard Thibault’s curse, and had been amazed and horrified at the instantaneous way in which it had worked. “Lay hold of him! knock him down! he is a wizard, a sorcerer! a were-wolf!”--applying to Thibault with this last word, one of the most terrible epithets that can be given to a man in our forest lands. Thibault, who scarcely knew where he was, seeing the momentary stupefaction which took possession of the farm people on hearing their mistress’s final invective, made use of the opportunity to dash past them, and while one went to get a pitch-fork and another a spade, he darted through the farm-yard gate, and began running up an almost perpendicular hill-side at full speed, with an ease which only confirmed Madame Polet’s suspicions, for the hill had always hitherto been looked upon as absolutely inaccessible, at any rate by the way Thibault had chosen to climb it. “What!” she cried, “what! you give in like that! you should make after him, and seize hold of him, and knock him down!” But the farm servants shook their heads. “Ah! Madame!” they said, “what is the use, what can we do against a were-wolf?” CHAPTER IX THE WOLF-LEADER