After the shout of: "Cossacks!" he saw not a soul on it; the fugitives had cast away shakoes, muskets, sabres, everything.
Fabrizio, quite bewildered, climbed up into a field on the right of the road and twenty or thirty feet above it; he scanned the line of the road in both directions, and the plain, but saw no trace of the Cossacks.
"Funny people, these French!" he said to himself. "Since I have got to go to the right," he thought, "I may as well start off at once; it is possible that these people have a reason for running away that I don't know."
He picked up a musket, saw that it was charged, shook up the powder in the priming, cleaned the flint, then chose a cartridge-pouch that was well filled and looked round him again in all directions; he was absolutely alone in the middle of this plain which just now had been so crowded with people.
In the far distance he could see the fugitives, who were beginning to disappear behind the trees, and were still running.
"That's a very odd thing," he said to himself, and remembering the tactics employed by the corporal the night before, he went and sat down in the middle of a field of corn.
He did not go farther because he was anxious to see again his good friends the cantiniere and Corporal Aubry.
In this cornfield, he made the discovery that he had no more than eighteen napoleons, instead of thirty as he had supposed; but he still had some small diamonds which he had stowed away in the lining of the hussar's boots, before dawn, in the gaoler's wife's room at B——.
He concealed his napoleons as best he could, pondering deeply the while on the sudden disappearance of the others.
"Is that a bad omen for me?" he asked himself.
What distressed him most was that he had not asked Corporal Aubry the question: "Have I really taken part in a battle?"
It seemed to him that he had, and his happiness would have known no bounds could he have been certain of this.
"But even if I have," he said to himself, "I took part in it bearing the name of a prisoner, I had a prisoner's marching orders in my pocket, and, worse still, his coat on my backl That is the fatal threat to my future: what would the Priore Blanes say to it?
And that wretched Boulot died in prison.
It is all of the most sinister augury; fate will lead me to prison."
Fabrizio would have given anything in the world to know whether Trooper Boulot had really been guilty; when he searched his memory, he seemed to recollect that the gaoler's wife had told him that the hussar had been taken up not only for the theft of silver plate but also for stealing a cow from a peasant and nearly beating the peasant to death: Fabrizio had no doubt that he himself would be sent to prison some day for a crime which would bear some relation to that of Trooper Boulot.
He thought of his friend the parroco Blanes: what would he not have given for an opportunity of consulting him!
Then he remembered that he had not written to his aunt since leaving Paris.
"Poor Gina!" he said to himself. And tears stood in his eyes, when suddenly he heard a slight sound quite close to him: a soldier was feeding three horses on the standing corn; he had taken the bits out of their mouths and they seemed half dead with hunger; he was holding them by the snaffle.
Fabrizio got up like a partridge; the soldier seemed frightened.
Our hero noticed this, and yielded to the pleasure of playing the hussar for a moment.
"One of those horses belongs to me, f—— you, but I don't mind giving you five francs for the trouble you've taken in bringing it here."
"What are you playing at?" said the soldier.
Fabrizio took aim at him from a distance of six paces.
"Let go the horse, or I'll blow your head off."
The soldier had his musket slung on his back; he reached over his shoulder to seize it.
"If you move an inch, you're a dead man!" cried Fabrizio, rushing upon him.
"All right, give me the five francs and take one of the horses," said the embarrassed soldier, after casting a rueful glance at the high road, on which there was absolutely no one to be seen.
Fabrizio, keeping his musket raised in his left hand, with the right flung him three five-franc pieces.
"Dismount, or you're a dead man. Bridle the black, and go farther off with the other two… . If you move, I fire."
The soldier looked savage but obeyed.
Fabrizio went up to the horse and passed the rein over his left arm, without losing sight of the soldier, who was moving slowly away; when our hero saw that he had gone fifty paces, he jumped nimbly on to the horse.
He had barely mounted and was feeling with his foot for the off stirrup when he heard a bullet whistle past close to his head: it was the soldier who had fired at him.
Fabrizio; beside himself with rage, started galloping after the soldier who ran off as fast as his legs could carry him, and presently Fabrizio saw him mount one of his two horses and gallop away.
"Good, he's out of range now," he said to himself.
The horse he had just bought was a magnificent animal, but seemed half starved.
Fabrizio returned to the high road, where there was still not a living soul; he crossed it and put his horse into a trot to reach a little fold in the ground on the left, where he hoped to find the cantiniere; but when he was at the top of the little rise he could see nothing save, more than a league away, a few scattered troops.
"It is written that I shall not see her again," he said to himself with a sigh, "the good, brave woman!"
He came to a farm which he had seen in the distance on the right of the road.
Without dismounting, and after paying for it in advance, he made the farmer produce some oats for his poor horse, which was so famished that it began to gnaw the manger.
An hour later, Fabrizio was trotting along the high road, still in the hope of meeting the cantiniere, or at any rate Corporal Aubry.
Moving all the time and keeping a look-out all round him, he came to a marshy river crossed by a fairly narrow wooden bridge.
Between him and the bridge, on the right of the road, was a solitary house bearing the sign of the White Horse.
"There I shall get some dinner," thought Fabrizio.
A cavalry officer with his arm in a sling was guarding the approach to the bridge; he was on horseback and looked very melancholy; ten paces away from him, three dismounted troopers were filling their pipes.
"There are some people," Fabrizio said to himself, "who look to me very much as though they would like to buy my horse for even less than he cost me."
The wounded officer and the three men on foot watched him approach and seemed to be waiting for him.
"It would be better not to cross by this bridge, but to follow the river bank to the right; that was the way the cantiniere advised me to take to get clear of difficulties… . Yes," thought our hero, "but if I take to my heels now, to-morrow I shall be thoroughly ashamed of myself; besides, my horse has good legs, the officer's is probably tired; if he tries to make me dismount I shall gallop."
Reasoning thus with himself, Fabrizio pulled up his horse and moved forward at the slowest possible pace.
"Advance, you, hussar!" the officer called to him with an air of authority.