The last house was passed. They were in the country, between a stream strewn with many boulders, and a steep slope which joined the forest up above.
"Too late," said Jean Oberlé, holding out his hand and stopping, "too late; you have said too much, Uncle Ulrich. I feel I belong to the older times, as you do. And so much the worse, as to-morrow I go up to the Schlucht. I shall see her--I shall say good day to our country of France!"
He laughed as he uttered these words. M. Ulrich shook his head once or twice to scold him, but without answering, and he went away into the mist.
The next day Jean started in the morning on foot to go to the cutting bought by the House of Oberlé, which was situated on the crest of the mountains, enclosing the valley, to the left of the neck of the Schlucht, in the forest of Stosswihr. The way was long--the soil made slippery by a recent shower; besides, Jean lost several hours in going round a great rock he ought to have climbed. The afternoon was well advanced when he came to a wood cabin at the place where the road ended: just the time to talk to the German foreman who directed, under the supervision of the forest administration, the felling and transport of the firs; and the young man, continuing his climb, passed the workmen from the timber-yard coming down before the end of the day, to regain the valley. The sun, still splendid, was about to disappear on the other side of the Vosges. Jean was thinking with a beating heart of the frontier now quite near; however, he would not ask the way of the men who saluted him in passing, for he prided himself on hiding his emotions, and his words might have betrayed him before this gang of woodcutters released from work, and curious at the meeting. He entered the cutting they had just left. Around him the pine-trees, branchless and despoiled of their bark, were lying on the slopes, which they seemed to light up by the whiteness of their trunks. They had rolled--and stopped--one could not see why. At other times they had made a barrier and placed themselves pell-mell like spilikins on a game board. In the high forest there only remained one workman, an old man dressed in dark clothes who, kneeling, tied up in his handkerchief, a store of mushrooms he had gathered. When he had finished tying the ends of the red stuff with his clumsy fingers he got up, pushed his woollen cap well on to his head, and began to descend, with long strides over the moss, his mouth open to the odour of the forests.