A huge black pot simmered over it, and beside one window lounged a country fellow talking with the goodwife.

In the dusk I could not see his face, but I gave the woman a word, and sat down to wait for my supper.
She seemed more silent than the common run of her kind; but this might be because her husband was present.

While she moved about getting my meal, he took his place against the door-post and fell to staring at me so persistently that I felt by no means at my ease.

He was a tall, strong fellow, with a shaggy moustache and brown beard, cut in the mode Henri Quatre; and on the subject of that king--a safe one, I knew, with a Bearnais--and on that alone, I found it possible to make him talk.
Even then there was a suspicious gleam in his eyes that bade me abstain from questions; so that as the darkness deepened behind him, and the firelight played more and more strongly on his features, and I thought of the leagues of woodland that lay between this remote valley and Auch, I recalled the Cardinal's warning that if I failed in my attempt I should be little likely to trouble Paris again.
The lout by the window paid no attention to me; nor I to him, when I had once satisfied myself that he was really what he seemed to be.
But by-and-by two or three men--rough, uncouth fellows--dropped in to reinforce the landlord, and they, too seemed to have no other business than to sit in silence looking at me, or now and again to exchange a word in a PATOIS of their own.

By the time my supper was ready, the knaves numbered six in all; and, as they were armed to a man with huge Spanish knives, and made it clear that they resented my presence in their dull rustic fashion--every rustic is suspicious--I began to think that, unwittingly, I had put my head into a wasps' nest.
Nevertheless, I ate and drank with apparent appetite; but little that passed within the circle of light cast by the smoky lamp escaped me.