"Make haste!" he exclaimed angrily, "you can make haste to get back your spirits of wine, but what do we care for it? Is the highway the place for us? Are we bandits that we should risk our lives?"
I understood at once that he wanted to escape, and was enraged.
"Take care, Schweyer," said I, "take care! If you and your boys go back, people will say that you have been a traitor to the city brandy, and that is worse than being a traitor to the flag, especially in a cooper."
"The devil take thee!" said he, "we ought never to have come."
However, he kept on ascending the hill with me. Nickel and Frantz followed us without hurrying.
When we reached the plateau we saw lights in the village. All was still and seemed quiet, although there was a great crowd around the two first houses.
The door of the Bunch of Grapes was wide open, and its kitchen fire shone through the passage to the street where my two wagons stood.
This crowd came from the Cossacks who were carousing at Heitz's house, after tying their horses under the shed. They had made Mother Heitz cook them a good hot soup, and we saw them plainly, two or three hundred paces distant, go up and down the outside steps, with jugs and bottles which they passed from one to another. The thought came to me that they were drinking my spirits of wine, for a lantern hung behind the first wagon, and the rascals were all going from it with their elbows raised. I was so furious that, regardless of danger, I began to run to put a stop to the pillage.
Fortunately the veterans were in advance of me, or I should have been murdered by the Cossacks; I had not gone half way when our whole troop sprang from the fences of the highway, and ran like a pack of wolves, crying out, "To the bayonet!"
You never saw such confusion, Fritz. In a second the Cossacks were on their horses, and the veterans in the midst of them; the front of the inn with its trellis, its pigeon-house, and its little fenced garden, was lighted up by the firing of muskets and pistols. Heitz's two daughters stood at the windows, with their arms lifted and screamed so that they could be heard all over Mittelbronn.