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Indeed, the Lords Marchers, as these border barons were called, lived necessarily in a state of warfare, which made it needful to entrust them with greater powers than their neighbors, around whom they formed a sort of cordon, to protect them from the forays of the half-savage Welsh.
A cordon of sentinels surrounded the bivouac; there was a group of soldiers around a beer-cart, another throng near the wine-cart. All was quiet, orderly, and terribly sombre. Near the poplar-trees the pioneers had dug their trenches and lighted fires. Across the trenches, on poles of green wood, were slung simmering camp-kettles.
'Take the body beyond the cordon, lads, said the corporal, still examining the gun, 'and put a shelter over him from the sun. Perhaps they'll send from the mountains to ransom it. 'It isn't hot yet, said someone. 'And supposing a jackal tears him? Would that be well? remarked another Cossack. 'We'll set a watch; if they should come to ransom him it won't do for him to have been torn.
What he found there has already been set forth. It was about ten that evening when Hartley, who had left his people, after dinner was over, at the Marigny, reached the rue d'Assas. The street door was already closed for the night, and so he had to ring for the cordon. When the door clicked open and he had closed it behind him he called out his name before crossing the court to Ste.
With a swift glance he took in the black circle of the forest. They were out there, too; they were on all sides of them, but where he had seen them first they were thickest. In these first few seconds he had forgotten Baree, awed almost to stupefaction by that monster-eyed cordon of death that hemmed them in.
Folding his arms, and grinning impudently at the astounded cordon of faces, Roke drawled: "I just dropped in to say 'Howdy' to Mr. Standish. Nobody was around. So I made bold to pick up the fiddle and have a little spiel. I ain't done any harm, and there's nothing you-all can hold me on." For ten seconds nobody answered. Nobody spoke or moved.
This isn't the highway I drove up on to find you, the one where my car's wrecked. This is another one. I don't think we're more than twenty miles from the Lake, here. And that's something I didn't intend!" He began to unload his pockets. "I got something for us to eat. We'll just have to lie low until night and fumble our way out toward the cordon, with the stars to guide us."
"Stand back!" shouted the mild old Rector transformed into a prophet-figure, his white hair streaming as the multitude swayed against the cordon of police. "Stand back! all of you and pray for this woman!" In a dead silence, men, shivering, took off their hats, and women sobbed. "Gertrude!"
Checked for a time by the calculating finesse of the triumvirs, he prepared to end matters by a single blow; and, when the time had come, he occupied the strategic points of the capital, drew a cordon of troops round the Tuileries, where the Councils sat, invaded the chambers of deputies and consigned to the Temple the royalists and moderates there present, with their leader, Pichegru.
A curious contrast they presented as they faced one another; the emaciated youth of twenty-five, the hand of Death already tightly fastened upon his meagre frame, coughing, hollow-cheeked, insignificant, flat-nosed, almost repulsive, who dragged himself to the witness chair, and the swaggering athlete who glared at him from the bar surrounded by his cordon of able counsel.
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