In the cool glimmering dawn of that June morning Harry was awakened by Max with the news that the brigands were moving from the copse. He hastened at once to his post, and saw that the parapet extended for some twenty yards along the farther side of the fosse, with a gap in the centre protected by a traverse. The enemy came forward rapidly, took up the palisades they had vainly endeavoured to throw across the fosse on the previous day, and under cover of the parapet began to rear them. As Harry had feared, musketry fire from the castle was almost wholly ineffectual: only the men on the top of the keep got an occasional chance as the besiegers incautiously moved away from their breastwork, thus exposing the upper part of their bodies. The long palisades were slowly reared on end, and lowered as slowly across the fosse, till the end nearer to Harry rested on the base of the barricade beneath the archway. When the last section was in its place, the fosse was spanned by a bridge wide enough to allow four men to cross it abreast. Harry felt a tightening at the heart as he realized the magnitude of the task he had set himself. His force, reduced by his losses to eighteen, including himself and the two English officers, who were scarcely effectives, was outnumbered by nearly eighteen to one. And the enemy were no feather-bed warriors. Looking at their motley array, he recognized that he had to contend with some of the fiercest, most desperate, least scrupulous men of war that Europe could produce. Their nationalities were as varied as their costumes. His inexperienced eye could not distinguish their types: but he saw small men and big men, men fair, men dark, old and young; some were born dandies, as their attempts at decoration in adverse circumstances showed; others born tatterdemalions, who even in affluence would have held the decencies of costume in derision. About a hundred seemed to be regular soldiers of the Elector of Bavaria’s army. Only one bond held them together: a common love of lawlessness and rapine. He felt a new respect for Aglionby; only a man of some moral force, however perverted, could have imposed his leadership on such a heterogeneous crew. At the moment Aglionby was in consultation with a few others at some distance, and out of range of the clumsy firearms of those days. Among the little group Harry singled out two men as of more consequence than the rest: a tall fellow matching the captain in height and bulk, wearing a red sash—the same man he had seen approaching the inn,—and a small active man in whose cap a peacock’s feather was jauntily stuck. They were evidently discussing with great animation their plan of attack.