"'Dieu vous bénisse, Officier,' cried the Frenchman in a mournful voice, while shuddering with cold and horror as he was stripped to his shirt; 'save me from this foul disgrace, and my prayers--yea, my life--shall be for ever at your disposal.'
"'Good comrade,' said I, 'entreat me not, for here I am powerless.'
"'Baron,' he exclaimed; 'I am a gentleman--a gentleman of old France, and I dare thee to lay thy damnable scourge upon me.'
"'Ach Gott; dare--do you say dare? ve vill zee,' laughed Van Wandenberg, as the prisoner was dragged forward and about to be forcibly trussed to the halberts by the trumpeters, when, animated to the very verge of insanity, he suddenly freed himself, and rushing like a madman upon the Baron, struck him from his horse by one blow of his clenched hand. The horse snorted, the Dutch troopers opened their saucer eyes wider still, as the great and corpulent mass fell heavily among the deepening snow, and in an instant the foot of the Frenchman was pressed upon his throat, while he exclaimed--
"'If I slay thee, thou hireling dog, as I have often slain thy clodpated countryman in other days,' and the Frenchman laughed fiercely, 'by St. Denis! I shall have one foeman less on this side of Hell.'
"'Gott in Himmel! ach! mein tuyvel! mein Gott!' gasped the Dutchman, as he floundered beneath the heel of the vengeful and infuriated Frenchman, who was determined on destroying him, till a blow from the baton of an officer stretched him almost senseless among the snow, where he was immediately grasped by the trumpeters, disrobed of his last remaining garment, and bound strongly to the halberts.
"Meanwhile the other prisoner had been pinioned and resolutely held by his escort, otherwise he would undoubtedly have fallen also upon Van Wandenberg, who, choking with a tempest of passion that was too great to find utterance in words, had gathered up his rotund figure, and with an agility wonderful in a man of his years and vast obesity, so heavily armed, in a buff coat and jack boots ribbed with iron, a heavy sword and cloak, clambered on the back of his horse, as a clown would climb up a wall: and with a visage alternating between purple and blue, by the effects of rage and strangulation, he surveyed the prisoner for a moment in silence, and there gleamed in his piggish grey eyes an expression of fury and pain, bitterness and triumph combined, and he was only able to articulate one word--