“Ho, there, my friend!” repeated the Baron still without recognising Thibault, “will it please you to answer me, yes or no.”
He paused a second.
“I see, it is evidently, no; you pretend to be deaf, my friend; wait a moment, and I will get my speaking-trumpet,” and he held out his hand to Marcotte, who, guessing his intention, handed him his gun.
Thibault, who wished to put the huntsmen on the wrong scent, was meanwhile pretending to cut away the dead branches, and he put so much energy into this feigned occupation that he did not perceive the movement on the part of the Baron, or, if he saw, only took it as a menace, without attaching the importance to it which it merited.
The wolf-hunter waited for a little while to see if the answer would come, but as it did not, he pulled the trigger; the gun went off, and a branch was heard to crack.
The branch which cracked was the one on which Thibault was poised; the Baron was a fine shot and had broken it just between the trunk and the shoe-maker’s foot.
Deprived of his support, Thibault fell, rolling from branch to banch. Fortunately the tree was thick, and the branches strong, so that his fall was broken and less rapid than it might have been, and he finally reached the ground, after many rebounds, without further ill consequences than a feeling of great fear and a few slight bruises on that part of his body which had first come in contact with the earth.
“By Beelzebub’s horns!” exclaimed the Baron, delighted with his own skill, “if it is not my joker of the morning! Ah! so, you scamp! did the discourse you had with my whip seem too short to you, that you are so anxious to take it up again where we left off?”
“Oh, as to that, I assure you it is not so, my Lord,” answered Thibault in a tone of the most perfect sincerity.
“So much the better for your skin, my good fellow. Well, and now tell me what you were doing up there, perched on the top of that oak-tree?”