So I undressed and went to bed. Five minutes later Mocquet was snoring like a bass viol.
I turned and twisted for a good two hours before I could get to sleep. How many sleepless nights have I not passed on the eve of the first shoot of the season! At last, towards midnight fatigue gained the mastery over me. A sudden sensation of cold awoke me with a start at four o’clock in the morning; I opened my eyes. Mocquet had thrown my bedclothes off over the foot of the bed, and was standing beside me, leaning both hands on his gun, his face beaming out upon me, as, at every fresh puff of his short pipe, the light from it illuminated his features.
“Well, how have you got on, Mocquet?”
“He has been tracked to his lair.”
“The wolf? and who tracked him?”
“This foolish old Mocquet.”
“Bravo!”
“But guess where he has chosen to take covert, this most accommodating of good wolves!”
“Where was it then, Mocquet?”
“If I gave you a hundred chances you wouldn’t guess! in the Three Oaks Covert.”
“We’ve got him, then?”
“I should rather think so.”
The Three Oaks Covert is a patch of trees and undergrowth, about two acres in extent, situated in the middle of the plain of Largny, about five hundred paces from the forest.