"Dioul!" muttered Phadrig Mhor, shaking his halbert; "why did you not think of that before, captain?" "There was a glamour before his eyes," said Gillian M'Bane in a whisper. "No," replied Phadrig, gravely, as he shouldered his enormous axe; "but the spy's _time_ is not yet come; it may come with our next meeting, if the captain looks better, for the oldest man that ever lived had to die at last." I was both ashamed and exasperated at being so outwitted by a rascal like this Spaniard. "May my tongue be blistered!" thought I; "for, if that was really Bandolo, between his cunning and my folly Duke Bernard will never reach the main army." I remembered the accurate numerical information I had afforded, and had no doubt he was riding as fast as his horse's heels could carry him to communicate with Tilly, who as yet was ignorant of our landing. We halted at the wood--the remnant of a venerable fir forest, covering about a square mile. I placed a sentinel in front of it, and towards the road; then we penetrated to the centre, and there in an open space piled arms, lighted a fire, and after carefully fencing it round with stones to prevent it reaching the roots of the trees, prepared to cook the provisions our havresacks contained. CHAPTER XXXVI. A FOREST ON FIRE! The poultry gleaned up by our foragers from the houses we had passed (_deserted_ houses, remember), and the beef provided by our _Fourrier de Campement_ before leaving the good ship, _Scottish Crown_ of Leith, were boiled together in camp-kettles; and while I, with Lieutenant Lumsdaine and my ensign, Hugh Rose (of the Kilravock family), and Phadrig, with Gillian M'Bane, and three other gentlemen-musketeers of my company, formed one little mess, the rest of our comrades formed another, and were squatted on the grass, rending the tough beef with their teeth, and cutting the fowls with their dirks and skenes, and each was as merry as a man may be whose life is so uncertain as a soldier's, and who tries to make the most of it while it lasts. Phadrig and Gillian were both duinewassals, and when at home in Strathdee both wore the wing of the Iolar in their bonnets. Honest Phadrig had lately declined a commission in another Scottish regiment, preferring his sergeant's halbert to the certainty of rank and being separated from Ian Dhu, whom his mother had nursed, and to whom he was hereditary henchman, loving him with that strong and reverential love which none but a Scottish Celt or an Irish peasant can understand. Supper over, we rolled our plaids about us, and, after posting fresh sentinels at the verge of the wood, lay down to sleep on the soft dry moss and grass which grew under the thick trees of this old primeval wood--the last fragment of an ancient forest that once had spread from sea to sea. At the same hour last night we had been breasting the waves of the Baltic.