The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono

morning. There were a dozen of them. They had piled their equipment in a small field. Their captain was a fat ruddy man with a curling red mustache, so thick that it even hid his chin.
    Angelo, having been afraid all night long and being in the habit of giving orders to captains, spoke very sharply to him about the soldiers who, before anything else, had set about brewing coffee some way off, joking in loud voices.
    The captain turned red as a turkey-cock and wrinkled his little pug-dog’s nose. “Gentlemen don’t exist any more,” he said, “and you’re singing a little too loud. I’m not to blame if your mother produced a monkey. I’ll teach you to watch your step. Take that pick and start digging if you don’t want my foot up your ass. I don’t like white hands, and you’ll soon learn who I am.”
    â€œThat’s plain already,” said Angelo; “you’re an unmannerly lout and I’m delighted that you don’t like my white hands because you’re going to get them in your face.”
    The captain drew back and pulled out his sword. Angelo ran to the pile and took a soldier’s short saber. The weapon was not half the length of his adversary’s, but Angelo disarmed the captain with ease. In spite of fatigue and hunger, he had immediately felt sure of himself and capable of magnificent cat-leaps. The captain’s sword flew twenty paces in the direction of the soldiers, who hadn’t ceased to stuff wood into their fire while they watched and sniggered over their shoulders.
    Without a word Angelo went back to where he had lain, freed the poor doctor’s horse, saddled his own, mounted, and made off, after casting a quick look at the two corpses, now snarling more fiercely than ever. He crossed the field obliquely at a jog trot. He had covered only a few hundred paces when he heard what sounded like large flies humming by and, immediately afterward, the faint patter of gunfire. He looked around and saw ten or so small white puffs of smoke beside the willows where the soldiers had piled their equipment. The captain had opened fire on him. He dug his heels into his horse and made off at a gallop.
    Shortly afterward he reached the road and continued to gallop. He now had neither cloak nor hat, his shirt was still soaked through with the night’s sweat, his chest too was damp; he felt that it was not so hot as on the other days. Yet it was the same chalky weather, the same mists. He had now neither saddlebag nor linen; his two pistols were loaded with only one round each. “Anyhow,” he told himself, thinking of his altercation with the captain, “I’d rather be hacked to pieces than kill a man with a pistol; even if he does insult my mother. I like settling accounts with weapons that allow me to humiliate rather than anything else. Death is no revenge. Death is odd,” he said to himself, thinking of the “poor little Frenchman.” “It seems very simple; and very practical.”
    He passed through a village where many people had tried this simple and practical device. The dead, fully dressed, in their shirts, naked, or worked over by the muzzles of the rats in their busy troops, lay piled in front of the houses on both sides of the road. They all had those fangs like mad dogs. Here there were already clouds of flies. The stench was so heavy that the horse was seized with panic and, probably terrified also by the carnival attitudes of some of the corpses, which were still standing and had their arms stretched out like crosses, took the bit between its teeth. Angelo let himself be carried on.
    By the end of the morning, he had crossed a deserted stretch of country where nothing suggested the epidemic, except the fields in which the rye, although ripe, was uncut and beginning to flatten. He had slept a little in his saddle, although the horse had maintained a pretty lively pace; he was warm and did not miss his