The angelic demon there had supplied him with the weapon, and he fired three shots as rapidly as the mechanism would work.
The dismounted gendarme had come out on an unlucky day; a bullet in his neck laid him lifeless in the rushes beside the strangled horse; his comrade, pierced so that he bled internally, drew off to the roadside mechanically--the image of despair; nothing more heartrending than the anguish on his convulsed visage and the increasingly hopeless expression.
Here was a double tragedy, but it was the major who, under the eyes of Fraulein von Vieradlers, was to furnish the comedy of the incident.

His horse took the bit in its teeth and ran away with him along the bank of the brook, threatening at any moment to lose footing and roll the two in the water.
"Victory!" said the girl, with a joy-flushed cheek, alighting and displaying no more compassion for the soldiers slain in doing their duty than for the chaise horse--or the old woman beside its heaving carcass.
"She is dead," remarked Claudius.

"But what did she say?
She spoke in Polish--I understand it--I caught the words, but they were not intelligible." "Were they not ?" continued the girl, not displeased.
"She said, 'my child!'" "Very well! I am her grandchild.

That was not all, though--she affectionately recommended you to me, as my cousin." "Cousin?
your cousin ?" repeated Claudius, without contradicting the speaker on his impression that Baboushka's face had not worn a soft expression, in his eyes.
"It would appear that you do not know yourself as Felix Clemenceau ?" "Clemenceau ?" echoed the student, remembering what he had heard in the music-hall.
"Yes; your father was the famous sculptor." Was his predilection for art a hereditary trait?
the son of a celebrity?
then his essays in design were unworthy of his name.

Abashed, inclined to despair, having a glimpse of a tumultuous rabble shouting: "At last he is here!" before the ruddy guillotine on a raw morning, a pale, prim man between the executioner's aids, the young Clemenceau listened to the girl, who probably resembled the Lovely Iza, but looked at the dead woman at their feet.
"Yes, we are cousins! that is why I took a fancy to you at the sight.