“Who is it, then?” said Porthos.
“Look!”
Porthos applied his eye to the slit, and saw at the summit of a hillock a dozen horsemen urging on their horses in the track of the dogs, shouting, “Tally-ho! tally-ho!”
“The Guards!” said he.
“Yes, my friend, the King’s Guards.”
“The King’s Guards, do you say, Monseigneur?” cried the Bretons, becoming pale in their turn.
“And Biscarrat at their head, mounted upon my gray horse,” continued Aramis.
The hounds at the same moment rushed into the grotto like an avalanche, and the depths of the cavern were filled with their deafening cries.
“Ah, the devil!” said Aramis, resuming all his coolness at the sight of this certain, inevitable danger. “I know well we are lost, but we have at least one chance left. If the guards who follow their hounds happen to discover there is an issue to the grotto, there is no more help for us, for on entering they must see both us and our boat. The dogs must not go out of the cavern. The masters must not enter.”
“That is clear,” said Porthos.
“You understand,” added Aramis, with the rapid precision of command; “there are six dogs which will be forced to stop at the great stone under which the fox has glided, but at the too narrow opening of which they shall be themselves stopped and killed.”
The Bretons sprang forward, knife in hand. In a few minutes there was a lamentable concert of growls and mortal howlings, and then- nothing.
“That’s well!” said Aramis, coolly; “now for the masters!”
“What is to be done with them?” said Porthos.
“Wait their arrival, conceal ourselves, and kill them.”
“Kill them!” replied Porthos.
“There are sixteen,” said Aramis,- “at least for the time being.”
“And well armed,” added Porthos, with a smile of consolation.
“It will last about ten minutes,” said Aramis. “To work!” And with a resolute air he took up a musket, and placed his hunting-knife between his teeth. “Yves, Goennec, and his son,” continued he, “will pass the muskets to us. You, Porthos, will fire when they are close. We shall have brought down eight before the others are aware of anything, that is certain; then we all- there are five of us- will despatch the other eight, knife in hand.”
“And poor Biscarrat?” said Porthos.
Aramis reflected a moment. “Biscarrat first of all,” replied he, coolly; “he knows us.”
Chapter LXXVI: The Grotto
IN SPITE of the sort of divination which was the remarkable side of the character of Aramis, the event, subject to the chances of things over which uncertainty presides, did not fall out exactly as the Bishop of Vannes had foreseen. Biscarrat, better mounted than his companions, arrived first at the opening of the grotto, and comprehended that the fox and the dogs were all engulfed in it. But, struck by that superstitious terror which every dark and subterraneous way naturally impresses upon the mind of man, he stopped at the outside of the grotto, and waited till his companions should have assembled round him.
“Well?” asked the young men, coming up out of breath, and unable to understand the meaning of his inaction.
“Well, I cannot hear the dogs; they and the fox must be all engulfed in this cavern.”
“They were too close up,” said one of the guards, “to have lost scent all at once; besides, we should hear them from one side or another. They must, as Biscarrat says, be in this grotto.”
“But then,” said one of the young men, “why don’t they give tongue?”
“It is strange!” said another.
“Well, but,” said a fourth, “let us go into this grotto. Is it forbidden that we should enter it?”
“No,” replied Biscarrat; “only, as it looks as dark as a wolf’s mouth, we might break our necks in it.”
“Witness the dogs,” said a guard, “who seem to have broken theirs.”
“What the devil can have become of them?” asked the young men, in chorus; and every master called his dog by his name, whistled to him in his favorite note, without a single reply to either the call or the whistle.
“It is perhaps an enchanted grotto,” said Biscarrat. “Let us see”; and jumping from his horse, he made a step into the grotto.