He waited, a vague smile playing on is face.
Mourgue, meantime, had caught sight of the pistols.

Hitherto he had allowed himself to be dragged along stupidly.

But fear now overcame him, and he repeated, in a tone of despair: "I come from Poujols--I come from Poujols!" Then he threw himself on the ground, rolling at the gendarme's feet, breaking out into prayers for mercy, and imagining that he was being mistaken for some one else.
"What does it matter to me that you come from Poujols ?" Rengade muttered.
And as the wretched man, shivering and crying with terror, and quite unable to understand why he was going to die, held out his trembling hands--his deformed, hard, labourer's hands--exclaiming in his patois that he had done nothing and ought to be pardoned, the one-eyed man grew quite exasperated at being unable to put the pistol to his temple, owing to his constant movements.
"Will you hold your tongue ?" he shouted.
Thereupon Mourgue, mad with fright and unwilling to die, began to howl like a beast--like a pig that is being slaughtered.
"Hold your tongue, you scoundrel!" the gendarme repeated.
And he blew his brains out.

The peasant fell with a thud.

His body rolled to the foot of a timber-stack, where it remained doubled up.