"For what purpose?"
"You will soon see," replied Karsseboom, as he slapped the butt of his musket with cool significance, and proceeded to kick, or scoop with his feet, a long trench in the soft snow.
"You do not—you cannot mean to butcher me here?" said I, following them closely.
"Halte là! Stand where you are," cried the corporal, "or, nom d'un Pape! I will shoot you down with my muzzle at your head. Ah, sacre!—canaille—Rosbif!"
A wild beating of the heart; a dryness of the lips, which I strove to moisten with my tongue; a dull sense of stupor and alarm, all soon to end, come over me, when cocking their pieces they retired backward close to the thicket. After carefully examining their priming, they were in the act of raising the butts to their shoulder to take aim, when thinking that all was over with me in this world, I strove to call to memory a prayer, and something like a solemn invocation of God was forming on my lips, when both muskets exploded upwards in the air, and their reports rung far away on the frosty atmosphere, making me give an involuntary and spasmodic leap nearly a yard high.
I looked, and lo! there were my corporal and his Teuton comrade lying prostrate in the snow, while a man of great stature, armed with a large cudgel, was brandishing it above them, and kicking them the while with uncommon vehemence and vigour.
"Lie there, ye loons!" he exclaimed, in a dialect I had little difficulty in recognising even in that exciting moment; "I have gi'en you a Liddesdale cloure, and you a Lockerbie lick on the chaffets—ye unco' vermin!" Then he proceeded to twirl his ponderous cudgel—a branch recently torn from a tree—round his head to dance among the snow and to sing—
"Wha daur meddle wi' me?
Wha daur meddle wi' me?
My name is wee Jock Elliot,
So wha daur meddle wi' me?"
On advancing, I found to my astonishment that my protector was my comrade, Big Hob Elliot of the Scots Greys!