"I never saw anything so funny in my life," said Margaret. "On with your coat, Oliver, before you take cold." From all of which I learned to take, as they did, the fat with the lean in soldiering, and not to care a brass farthing which it was. Still, I was as yet so young at the game, that, though I was careful to swagger it out and say nothing, I did wonder why the body from the south was so small. And I wonder as I write whether it was or was not the mistake of my life merely to wonder then. CHAPTER XIV "WAR HAS ITS RISKS" I slept unsoundly and in snatches. Margaret was in the room beneath me, "dreaming in Italian," thought I, in unhappy imitation of her dainty gibe at her father. A problem was on my mind, and that was ever with me an enemy to sleep. I meant being the best of soldiers, and this that worried me was a military problem. To be short, I could not help asking myself, "Were the dragoons from the south intended as a reinforcement to the horse from the north?" And somehow I could not think they were. As the top-dog spirit in me put it: "It was like sending Jack to reinforce me. _Quod est absurdum_." Time the Explainer permits me to be frank. There was this other side to my problem that I could not bring myself to be sure the Colonel's escape had come merely by happy chance. He was no party to contriving it, of that I never doubted, but it did look like a contrivance. We had been at the "Rising Sun" for six hours or more. Stone, the nearest head-quarters of Cumberland's forces, was only nine miles south of it, yet no attempt had been made to follow the fugitive. No, thought I again, that's wrong. Weir was sent on his track and actually found him. But this was as useless, so it seemed, as sending twenty dragoons, hundreds being available, to reinforce a thousand stout horse. There was no proportion between the ends proposed and the means adopted. If the handful of dragoons were not a reinforcement, it was a pursuit of us, and this posed another problem. Why had the pursuit been allowed to flag all the afternoon and evening, to be taken up again far on in the night? What fresh fact, if any, had determined it? I could think of none, nor, on reflection, was one wanted, since both Master Freake and Jack had last night witnessed to the worn-out state of Brocton's horses. Consequently his dragoons would have been sent after the Colonel earlier had they been fit. Their coming, when fit, proved their anxiety to retake him. Therefore he was not allowed to escape, and the conclusion of my argument hit its major premise clean in the teeth. "Oliver, my boy," said I to myself, "say a bit of Virgil and go to sleep. These matters are beyond you."