down upon it more calmly. He carried his fowling-piece as if it had
been a light walking-cane. Butifer was a young man of middle height,

thin, muscular, and in good training; his beauty was of a masculine
order, which impressed Genestas on a closer view.

Evidently he belonged to the class of smugglers who ply their trade
without resorting to violent courses, and who only exert patience and

craft to defraud the government. His face was manly and sunburned. His
eyes, which were bright as an eagle's, were of a clear yellow color,

and his sharply-cut nose with its slight curve at the tip was very
much like an eagle's beak. His cheeks were covered with down, his red

lips were half open, giving a glimpse of a set of teeth of dazzling
whiteness. His beard, moustache, and the reddish whiskers, which he

allowed to grow, and which curled naturally, still further heightened
the masculine and forbidding expression of his face. Everything about

him spoke of strength. He was broad-chested; constant activity had
made the muscles of his hands curiously firm and prominent. There was

the quick intelligence of a savage about his glances; he looked
resolute, fearless, and imperturbable, like a man accustomed to put

his life in peril, and whose physical and mental strength had been so
often tried by dangers of every kind, that he no longer felt any

doubts about himself. He wore a blouse that had suffered a good deal
from thorns and briars, and he had a pair of leather soles bound to

his feet by eel-skin thongs, and a pair of torn and tattered blue
linen breeches through which his legs were visible, red, wiry, hard,

and muscular as those of a stag.
"There you see the man who once fired a shot at me," Benassis remarked

to the commandant in a low voice. "If at this moment I were to signify
to him my desire to be rid of any one, he would kill them without

scruple.--Butifer!" he went on, addressing the poacher, "I fully
believed you to be a man of your word; I pledged mine for you because

I had your promise. My promise to the procureur du roi at Grenoble was
based upon your vow never to go poaching again, and to turn over a new

leaf and become a steady, industriousworker. You fired that shot just
now, and here you are, on the Comte de Labranchoir's estate! Eh! you

miscreant? Suppose his keeper had happened to hear you? It is a lucky
thing for you that I shall take no formal cognizance of this offence;

if I did, you would come up as an old offender, and of course you have
no gun license! I let you keep that gun of yours out of tenderness for

your attachment to the weapon."
"It is a beauty," said the commandant, who recognized a duck gun from

Sainte Etienne.
The smuggler raised his head and looked at Genestas by way of

acknowledging the compliment.
"Butifer," continued Benassis, "if your conscience does not reproach

you, it ought to do so. If you are going to begin your old tricks
again, you will find yourself once more in a park enclosed by four

stone walls, and no power on earth will save you from the hulks; you
will be a marked man, and your character will be ruined. Bring your

gun to me to-night, I will take care of it for you."
Butifer gripped the barrel of his weapon in a convulsive clutch.

"You are right, sir," he said; "I have done wrong, I have broken
bounds, I am a cur. My gun ought to go to you, but when you take it

away from me, you take all that I have in the world. The last shot
which my mother's son will fire shall be through my own head. . . .

What would you have? I did as you wanted me. I kept quiet all winter;
but the spring came, and the sap rose. I am not used to day labor. It

is not in my nature to spend my life in fattening fowls; I cannot
stoop about turning over the soil for vegetables, nor flourish a whip

and drive a cart, nor scrub down a horse in a stable all my life, so I
must die of starvation, I suppose? I am only happy when I am up

there," he went on after a pause, pointing to the mountains. "And I
have been about among the hills for the past week; I got a sight of a

chamois, and I have the chamois there," he said, pointing to the top
of the crag; "it is at your service! Dear M. Benassis, leave me my

gun. Listen! I will leave the Commune, foi de Butifer! I will go to
the Alps; the chamois-hunters will not say a word; on the contrary,

they will receive me with open arms. I shall come to grief at the
bottom of some glacier; but, if I am to speak my mind, I would rather

live for a couple of years among the heights, where there are no
governments, nor excisemen, nor gamekeepers, nor procureurs du roi,

than grovel in a marsh for a century. You are the only one that I
shall be sorry to leave behind; all the rest of them bore me! When you

are in the right, at any rate you don't worry one's life out----"
"And how about Louise?" asked Benassis. Butifer paused and turned

thoughtful.
"Eh! learn to read and write, my lad," said Genestas; "come and enlist

in my regiment, have a horse to ride, and turn carabineer. If they
once sound 'to horse' for something like a war, you will find out that

Providence made you to live in the midst of cannon, bullets, and
battalions, and they will make a general of you."

"Ye-es, if Napoleon was back again," answered Butifer.
"You know our agreement," said the doctor. "At the second infraction

of it, you undertook to go for a soldier. I give you six months in
which to learn to read and write, and then I will find some young

gentleman who wants a substitute."
Butifer looked at the mountains.

"Oh! you shall not go to the Alps," cried Benassis. "A man like you, a
man of his word, with plenty of good stuff in him, ought to serve his

country and command a brigade, and not come to his end trailing after
a chamois. The life that you are leading will take you straight to the

convict's prison. After over-fatiguing yourself, you are obliged to
take a long rest; and, in the end, you will fall into idle ways that

will be the ruin of any notions of orderlyexistence that you have;
you will get into the habit of putting your strength to bad uses, and

you will take the law into your own hands. I want to put you, in spite
of yourself, into the right path."

"So I am to pine and fret myself to death? I feel suffocated whenever
I am in a town. I cannot hold out for more than a day, in Grenoble,

when I take Louise there----"
"We all have our whims, which we must manage to control, or turn them

to account for our neighbor's benefit. But it is late, and I am in a
hurry. Come to see me to-morrow, and bring your gun along with you. We

will talk this over, my boy. Good-bye. Go and sell your chamois in
Grenoble."

The two horsemen went on their way.
"That is what I call a man," said Genestas.

"A man in a bad way," answered Benassis. "But what help is there for
it? You heard what he said. Is it not lamentable to see such fine

qualities running to waste? If France were invaded by a foreign foe,
Butifer at the head of a hundred young fellows would keep a whole

division busy in Maurienne for a month; but in a time of peace the
only outlets for his energy are those which set the law at defiance.

He must wrestle with something; whenever he is not risking his neck he
is at odds with society, he lends a helping hand to smugglers. The

rogue will cross the Rhone, all by himself, in a little boat, to take
shoes over into Savoy; he makes good his retreat, heavy laden as he

is, to some inaccessible place high up among the hills, where he stays
for two days at a time, living on dry crusts. In short, danger is as

welcome to him as sleep would be to anybody else, and by dint of
experience he has acquired a relish for extreme sensations that has

totally unfitted him for ordinary life. It vexes me that a man like
that should take a wrong turn and gradually go to the bad, become a

bandit, and die on the gallows. But, see, captain, how our village
looks from here!"

Genestas obtained a distant view of a wide circular space, planted
with trees, a fountain surrounded by poplars stood in the middle of

it. Round the enclosure were high banks on which a triple line of
trees of different kinds were growing; the first row consisted of

acacias, the second of Japanese varnish trees, and some young elms
grew on the highest row of all.

"That is where we hold our fair," said Benassis. "That is the
beginning of the High Street, by those two handsome houses that I told