The grey light of this winter's morning had only vaguely pierced the surrounding gloom, and the basement beneath the molens still looked impenetrably dark. Dark and silent! the soldiers—foreign mercenaries and louts—had vanished in the fog, arms hastily thrown down littered the mud-covered ground, swords, pistols, muskets, torn clothing, here and there a neck-cloth, a steel bonnet, a bright coloured sash. Stoutenburg saw it all, right through the gloom, and he ground his teeth together to smother a cry of agonised impotence.
Only now and then a ghostly form flitted swift and silent among the intricate maze of beams, a laggard left behind in the general scramble for safety, or a human scavenger on the prowl for loot. Now and then a groan or a curse came from out the darkness, and a weird, shapeless, moving thing would crawl along in the mud like some creeping reptile seeking its lair. But Stoutenburg looked neither to right nor left. He paid no heed to these swiftly fleeting ghostlike forms. He knew well enough that he would find silence here, that three dozen men—cowards and mercenaries all—had been scattered like locusts before a gale. Overhead he heard the tramping of feet, his friends—Beresteyn, Heemskerk, van Does—were making ready for flight. His one scheme of vengeance—that for which he had thirsted and plotted and sinned—had come to nought, but he had yet another in his mind—one which, if successful, would give him no small measure of satisfaction for the failure of the other.
And ahead the outline of the hastily improvised gallows detached itself out of the misty shroud, and from the Lord of Stoutenburg's throat there came a fierce cry of joy which surely must have delighted all the demons in hell.
He hurried on, covering with swift eager steps the short distance that separated him from the gibbet.
He called loudly to Jan, for it seemed to him as if the place was unaccountably deserted. He could not see Jan nor yet the prisoner, and surely Piet the Red had not proved a coward.
The solid beams above and around him threw back his call in reverberating echoes. He called again, and from far away a mocking laugh seemed alone to answer him.
Like a frightened beast now he bounded forward. There were the gallows not five paces away from him; the planks hastily hammered together awhile ago were creaking weirdly, buffeted by the wind, and up aloft the rope was swinging, beating itself with a dull, eerie sound against the wood.
The Lord of Stoutenburg—dazed and stupefied—looked on this desolate picture like a man in a dream.
"My lord!"
The voice came feebly from somewhere close by.