I waited long at a small house near the seashore, watching a little dogger beating with her two sails to seaward against a head wind, and threading a devious passage between the fragments of ice that flecked the sea with white; and in the evening I had the satisfaction of seeing a large king's ship, with her white sails shining in the setting sun, and her decks evidently crowded by soldiers, standing up the bosom of the narrow Sound.
I remounted my trooper, which I received from a cottager, who was remarkably polite for a Danish boor, and who informed me that he was half a Scot, as his father had come over with Captain Michael Wemyss' Scottish band in the preceding century, to serve in the old Swedish war. But the peasants were frequently very insolent to us, as foreign soldiers; on many occasions our men had been maltreated, and in two instances our officers had been murdered. For these pranks we usually made the people pay dearly, by sending the slain man's nearest kinsmen under a sergeant to the immediate locality, where, if they failed to find and shoot the perpetrators, they burned the houses, and houghed the cattle by a gash of the skene-dhu, in the old Highland fashion.
On this evening I was involved in one of those quarrels, when returning through a village at the entrance of which the bailiff of Laaland had established a toll, for some reason best known to his worship. In consequence of the dilapidated condition of King Christian's exchequer, we had been without pay for three months; thus I was without a coin to satisfy the gate ward, who peremptorily demanded a Danish fourpenny piece (twelve of which make a rixdollar), and deliberately barred my progress with a halbert.
In vain did I tell this churlish boor that I was travelling on the king's service (which by the by was not quite the case), others sallied out from the adjacent houses variously armed; and it was evident that, unless I chose to share the fate of poor Ensign Ludovick Lamond, who had lately been cut to pieces by the boors at Rodbye, there was no time to be lost. Drawing my claymore, and putting spurs to my horse, I hewed the fellow's halbert in two by one blow, hurled him to the earth, and passed the toll-gate, narrowly escaping the discharge of five or six pistolettes which were fired at that moment from behind an evergreen hedge; the leaves of which were scattered about me by the bullets.
Intent on avenging this outrage; I galloped back to the castle of Nyekiöbing; but soon found that fate had prepared other work for me.
By that time the king's ship had just come to anchor abreast of the town; a boat which shot off her side had just reached the landing-place; an officer of Highlanders sprang upon the mole, and I recognised the outspread eagle's pinion of Ian's helmet, even before he approached me.
With two thousand five hundred musketeers and pikemen, the wreck of his army, King Christian required us to repair to Rodbye, whither he had commanded the scattered companies of the regiment to muster under Ian Dhu, our lieutenant-colonel; and as the rash prince was about to make a bold attack upon the cantonments of some of Wallenstein and Tilly's now united and mighty host, which occupied all the promontory of North and South Juteland, from the banks of the Elbe to the Skagen cape, my company was to embark without an hour's delay on board the Anna Catharina, the ship of Sir Nickelas Valdemar, who had already received the companies of Angus Roy M'Alpine, Munro of Culcraigie, and Sir Patrick Mackay, from Maribœ, in the centre of Laaland, and all the little detachments of ours which occupied the castles of the isles.
"Alas, for Ernestine!" thought I, when hurrying back to the castle of Nyekibing; "how joyous to me would these tidings once have been!"
I met one of her attendants (Juliane Vüg, the warder's daughter), and desired her to inform Lady Ernestine that I craved a moment's interview, to bid a long farewell.
The girl went to her apartments, and returned to me almost immediately, with an expression of astonishment and consternation impressed on her fair, florid, and otherwise stolid visage, but unable to articulate a syllable, save some trash about "the fate of her mother—and the Trolds."