"Your magazine of powder, was it not?"
"Twenty tons were stored up in the Hall of Appeal. On the night of the bombardment I had a saucisson laid, and the hall undermined, to blow up the whole in case of being obliged to abandon Kiel. Your partial conflagration fired the saucisson, and has cost the emperor more powder than he will probably commit to my care again—for some time at least."
"And my comrades—did they all escape?"
"All, save one. Favoured by the confusion, they vanished from the streets, and, regaining their boats, got clear off; but that secret entrance will not serve their purpose a second time."
"And he who did not escape?" said I.
"Is now hanging from yonder tower," said the count, opening one of the pointed windows, and showing me a prospect of the town, the chief feature of which was the great square tower of the church, with its lofty and tapering hexagonal spire, from the summit of which there dangled something like a crow. I could perceive it to be a human figure, but diminished by distance, and wavering in the sea breeze; it swung to and fro, now against the spire, and now a few feet from it in the air.
"Count Kœningheim," said I, turning with anxiety and indignation from this startling spectacle, "and have you—who, like myself, am a Scottish soldier of fortune—dared to hang one of my comrades?"
"If yonder Danish purser, whilome a distiller and smuggler, was one of your comrades, then I have indeed dared to do so."
"The poor man was only serving his king and his country."
"He has cost the Emperor twenty tons of good gunpowder—an unanswerable argument," replied the count, as he folded up his despatch and endorsed it to Tilly, whose troops were down somewhere about the mouth of the Elbe. "And did you really imagine, Captain Rollo, that I would have hanged one of our kindly Scots, as I hung yonder purser? Hawks dinna pyke oot hawks' een; and I assure you, that although we fight under different banners, I love the blue bonnet far too well to hang its wearer as a Danish scarecrow. In the devilish mood I was in on the night of the bombardment, I would have thought no more of slaying you—if able—than of taking this glass of wine; but after the affair was over—after I thought you fairly crushed to death—and a day or two had elapsed, it seemed a shame and a scandal to me that a brave Scot, with the tartan on his breast and the kilt above his knee, should lie uncoffined like a dog under a fallen house. I set the pioneers of Camargo to dig out your remains, and had fully resolved to inter them with all the honours of war in the great church of the good city of Kiel. We had not the most remote hope of finding you alive in the vault, like Holger Danske in that dungeon under Cronborg castle, where, as the legend says, he has sat for a thousand years with his armed knights around him."