The limeburner was a
dry, thin man of no particular stature, who coughed a little between his
sentences, and had a habit, when not talking, of humming to himself, as
if in apology for his silence. This humming had no sort of tune or
purpose, and was but a vague musical sputtering. He almost perilled the
gravity of the oath they all took to Valmond by this idiosyncrasy. His
occupation gave him a lean, arid look; his hair was crisp and straight,
shooting out at all points, and it flew to meet his cap as if it were
alive. He was a genius after a fashion, too, and at all the feasts and
on national holidays he invented some new feature in the entertainments.
With an eye for the grotesque, he had formed a company of jovial blades,
called Kalathumpians, after the manner of the mimes of old times in his
beloved Dauphiny.
"All right, all right," he said, when Lagroin, in the half-lighted
blacksmith shop, asked him to swear allegiance and service. "'Brigadier,
vous avez raison,'" he added, quoting a well-known song. Then he hummed
a little and coughed. "We must have a show"--he hummed again--"we must
tickle 'em up a bit--touch 'em where they're silly with a fiddle and
fife-raddy dee dee, ra dee, ra dee, ra dee!" Then, to Valmond: "We gave
the fools who fought the Little Corporal sour apples in Dauphiny, my
dear!"
He followed this extraordinary speech with a plan for making an ingenious
coup for Valmond, when his Kalathumpians should parade the streets on the
evening of St.
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