He alighted on it, and drove it deep into the quaking slime; but he
himself bounded off right-handed. The peril was appalling, the
possibility untried, the chance one which only a doomed man would have
taken. But he reached the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a
precarious footing. He could not regain his balance, he could not even
for an instant stand upright on it. But from its support he leapt on
convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the
shoulder, he fell his length in the slough--but forward, with his
outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. They sank, it is
true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward,
and freeing one by a last effort of strength--he could not free both,
and, as it was, half his face was submerged--he reached out another yard,
and gripped a balk of wood, which projected from the corner of the
building for the purpose of fending off the stream in flood-time.
The men at the window shrieked with rage as he slowly drew himself from
the slough, and stood from head to foot a pillar of mud. Shout as they
might, they had no firearms, and, crowded together in the narrow
embrasure, they could take no aim with their pikes. They could only look
on in furious impotence, flinging curses at him until he passed from
their view, behind the angle of the building.
Here for a score of yards a strip of hard foreshore ran between mud and
wall. He struggled along it until he reached the end of the wall; then
with a shuddering glance at the black heaving pit from which he had
escaped, and which yet gurgled above the body of the hapless Maudron--a
tribute to horror which even his fierce nature could not withhold--he
turned and painfully climbed the river-bank. The pike-wound in his
shoulder was slight, but the effort had been supreme; the sweat poured
from his brow, his visage was grey and drawn. Nevertheless, when he had
put fifty paces between himself and the buildings of the Arsenal he
paused, and turned. He saw that the men had run to other windows which
looked that way; and his face lightened and his form dilated with
triumph.
He shook his fist at them. "Ho, fools!" he cried, "you kill not Tavannes
so! Till our next meeting at Montfaucon, fare you well!"