"I'll cheat the wuddy o' ye, that I will! Hech, ye damned tyke, think ye I'll ever lippen to a bodach that wore breeks!" Then he came forth panting and breathless. Seeing that without one desperate venture all was over with us, I had rushed from my hiding-place, thrown down the table, extinguished the lights, closed with the frail, old Tilly, and escaping a pistol-shot, which he fired within a yard of my nose, wrested and tore away from his hand the long rapier with which he menaced me. Had I chosen, I could there have run it through his heart, and saved Denmark, yea, and Germany, from the Thirty Years' War; but he was an aged man, and I was not an assassin. "Awa, sir--awa! Hide or rin, flee or soom--let us awa, or we'll tyne our lives!" cried Dreghorn, and we rushed from the dark apartment, to find the corridor and staircase crowded by Reitres and pikemen, with drawn swords, lighted torches, and stable lanterns; for the uproar and the pistol-shot had alarmed Tilly's guard of honour, and brought all the soldiers, like a swarm of hornets, to his rescue. "Dreghorn--farewell to life," said I; "it is all over with us!" "We've owre mony maisters noo," he groaned; "as the puddock said, whan ilka tuith o' the harrow gied him a tid." Before this flood of armed men we retired backward into the darkened room, where Tilly was reclining breathlessly against a post of the bed, from beneath which Bandolo, with a savage and lacrymose visage, blackened and distorted by rage and strangulation, was already crawling forth. We were about to be cut down without farther parley, when Tilly, remembering that I had spared his life, and Count Kœningheim, who hurried forward in his breeches and boots, minus vest and doublet, threw themselves between us and death, and saved us for a time. "Withhold your hand, Bandolo--count, secure these villains!" said Tilly; "away with them to the quarter-guard, I will deal with them in the morning. Search this, and all the other apartments; double all the sentinels, for I fear me much there has been treachery." We were immediately hurried away to a lower apartment, and handcuffed together. On the way we passed old Spürrledter, who had been alarmed by the uproar, and appeared in his shirt, blowing the match of his carbine. On beholding us, he gaped with well-feigned astonishment, which we understood quite well, and thus neither compromised the count nor the old corporal, who, with horses for our flight, had been waiting in an adjacent thicket for three hours, as he afterwards told me; and further, that the moment Tilly was fairly in his own apartment, that he--the corporal--had come in search of us, and, being totally unable to account for our mysterious disappearance at a time so critical, had retired to bed in the stables, supposing that we had escaped without him. Book the Fifth. CHAPTER XXVII. THE MARCH TOWARDS LAUENBURG.