When La Pechina, with the jug on her head, was about half-way, Nicolas slid like a wild-cat down the trunk of an elm, among the branches of which he was hiding, and fell like a thunderbolt in front of the girl, who flung away her pitcher and trusted to her fleet legs to regain the pavilion. But a hundred feet farther on, Catherine Tonsard, who was on the watch, rushed out of the wood and knocked so violently against the flying girl that she was thrown down. The violence of the fall made her unconscious. Catherine picked her up and carried her into the woods to the middle of a tiny meadow where the Silver-spring brook bubbled up.
Catherine Tonsard was tall and strong, and in every respect the type of woman whom painters and sculptors take, as the Republic did in former days, for their figures of Liberty. She charmed the young men of the valley of the Avonne with her voluminous bosom, her muscular legs, and a waist as robust as it was flexible; with her plump arms, her eyes that could flash and sparkle, and her jaunty air; with the masses of hair twisted in coils around her head, her masculine forehead and her red lips curling with that same ferocious smile which Eugene Delacroix and David (of Angers) caught and represented so admirably. True image of the People, this fiery and swarthy creature seemed to emit revolt through her piercing yellow eyes, blazing with the insolence of a soldier. She inherited from her father so violent a nature that the whole family, except Tonsard, and all who frequented the tavern feared her.
“Well, how are you now?” she said to La Pechina as the latter recovered consciousness.
Catherine had placed her victim on a little mound beside the brook and was bringing her to her senses with dashes of cold water. “Where am I?” said the child, opening her beautiful black eyes through which a sun-ray seemed to glide.
“Ah!” said Catherine, “if it hadn’t been for me you’d have been killed.”
“Thank you,” said the girl, still bewildered; “what happened to me?”
“You stumbled over a root and fell flat in the road over there, as if shot. Ha! how you did run!”
“It was your brother who made me,” said La Pechina, remembering Nicolas.
“My brother? I did not see him,” said Catherine. “What did he do to you, poor fellow, that should make you fly as if he were a wolf? Isn’t he handsomer than your Monsieur Michaud?”