Frenchmen are brave, of course, and these were as brave as any. But between bravery and temerity there is a limit which no healthy mind will overstep. After all, if the railway had not run into a flooded plain, if the carriage had not upset five miles from Freschal, our instrumentalists would not have had to venture by night along this suspicious road. It was to be hoped that no harm would happen to them.

It was about eight o’clock when Sebastien Zorn and his companions started towards the coast, as directed by the driver. As they had only their leather violin cases, light and handy, the violinists had little reason to grumble. Neither the wise Frascolin, nor the cheery Pinchinat, nor the idealist Yvernès, had a word of complaint. But the ‘cellist with his case—a cupboard as it were on his back! Knowing his character, we can understand that he found every opportunity of working himself into a rage. Hence groans and grunts exhaling under the onomatopœic forms of “ahs,” and “ohs,” and “oufs.”

The darkness was already profound. Thick clouds chased each other across the sky, drifting apart into narrow rifts, from which occasionally peeped a fitful moon, almost in its first quarter. Somehow, why we know not, unless it were that he was peevish and irritable, the pale Phoebe did not please Sebastien Zorn. He pointed his finger at her, exclaiming, —

“What are you doing there with your stupid face? I know nothing more imbecile than that slice of unripe melon up there!”

“It would be better if the moon were to look us in the face,” said Frascolin.

“And for what reason?” asked Pinchinat.

“Because we could see it more clearly.”

“O chaste Diana!”  declaimed Yvernès. “O messenger of the peaceful night! O pale satellite of the earth! O adored idol of the adorable Endymion!—”

“Have you finished your ballad?” asked the ‘cellist. “When the first violins take to flourishing on the fourth string—”

“Take longer strides,” said Frascolin, “or we shall have to sleep under the stars.”

“If there are any,” observed Pinchinat. “And lose our concert at San Diego.”

“A fine idea, my word!”  exclaimed Zorn, shaking his box, which gave forth a plaintive sound.

“But this idea, my old friend, was yours,” said Pinchinat.

“Mine?”

“Undoubtedly! That we did not remain at San Francisco, when we had quite a collection of Californian ears to charm.”

“Once more,” asked the ‘cellist, “why did we start?”

“Because you wished it!”

“Well, I must admit that it was a deplorable inspiration, and if—”

“Ah, my friends!” said Yvernès, pointing towards a point in the sky where a narrow moon-ray fell on the whitish edges of a cloud.

“What is the matter, Yvernès?”

“Look at that cloud turning into the shape of a dragon, its wings open, a peacock’s tail eyed as with the hundred eyes of Argus.”

Perhaps Sebastien Zorn did not possess that power of hundredfold vision which distinguished the guardian of the son of Machus, for he did not notice a deep rut into which he trod. Consequently he fell on his face, with his box on his back, and looked like some huge beetle creeping over the ground.

Violent rage of the instrumentalist—and he had cause to be angry—and then objurgations on account of the first violin’s admiration of the aerial monster.

“It is the fault of Yvernès!” said Sebastien Zorn. “If I had not been looking at that confounded dragon—”

“It is no longer a dragon, it is an amphora! with the gift of imagination but feebly developed you can see it in the hands of Hebe who is pouring out the nectar—”

“Take care that there is not too much water in that nectar,” exclaimed Pinchinat, “and that your charming goddess of youth does not give us an overdose of it.”

Here was another trouble in store; rain was apparently coming. Prudence required that they should make haste so as to get into shelter at Freschal.

They picked up the ‘cellist, as angry as he could be. They put him on his legs, growling all the time. Frascolin good-naturedly offered to carry the case, but this Zorn refused. Separate himself from his instrument! one of Gand and Bernardel’s, almost a part of himself? But he had to give in, and this precious half passed on to the back of the useful Frascolin, who entrusted his light violin case to Zorn.

The route was resumed. They walked at a good pace for two miles. No incident worth mentioning; the night getting blacker and blacker with every promise of rain. A few drops fell, very large ones, a proof that they came from clouds high in the air and stormy. But Hebe’s amphora did not overflow, and our four travellers hoped to reach Freschal perfectly dry.

Careful precautions were constantly necessary against falls on the dark road, deeply cut into by ravines, turning suddenly, bordered by high crags, skirting gloomy precipices with the roar of the torrents beneath.

Yvernès thought the position was poetical; Frascolin that it was alarming. There was the fear of certain meetings which make the safety of travellers on the roads of Lower California rather problematical. The only weapons possessed by the quartette were the bows of the violins and the ‘cello, and these would appear to be insufficient in a country where Colt’s revolvers were invented. If Sebastien Zorn and his comrades had been Americans, they would have been furnished with one of those engines of warfare, kept in a special pocket of the trousers. Even for a trip from San Francisco to San Diego a real Yankee would never have started without carrying a six-shot viaticum. But Frenchmen had not thought it necessary. We may add that they had not thought about it, and perhaps would repent it. Pinchinat marched at the head, peering right and left as he walked. Practical joker as he was, “his highness” could not help playing off a few pleasantries on his comrades. Pulling up short, for instance, every now and then, and muttering in a voice tremulous with fear, —

“Ah! There! What is that I see before me? Be ready to fire.”

But when the road plunged through a thick forest, amid mammoth trees, sequoias a hundred and fifty feet high, vegetable giants of these Californian regions, his joking humour disappeared. Ten men might hide behind one of these enormous trunks. A bright flash, followed by a report, the swift whistling of a bullet, might they not see it, might they not hear it? In such places so suitable for a nocturnal attack, an ambush was plainly suggested.