They left the panting horses and, bending forward, climbed up the hill among the bushes. Over the wall looked down several Cossack heads with hanging hair, yellow and grinning as those of beheaded criminals.
“Look!” whispered the king, and smote his hands together. “They’re trying to pull shut the rotten gate, the fox-tails!”
His glance, but recently so expressionless, became now flickering and anon open and shining. He drew his broadsword and raised it with both hands above his head. Like a young man’s god he stormed in through the half-open door. The ensign, who cut and thrust by his side, was often close to being struck from behind by his weapon. A musket shot blackened the king’s right temple. Four men were cut down in the gateway and the fifth of the band fled with a fire-shovel into the garden, pursued by the king.
Then the king wiped off the blood from his sword on the snow, while he laid two ducats in the Cossack’s shovel and burst out with rising spirits, “It is no pleasure to fight with these wretches, who never strike back and only run. Come back when you have bought yourself a decent sword.”
The Cossack, who understood nothing, stared at the gold-pieces, sneaked along the wall to the gate, and fled. Ever further and further away on the plain he called his roving comrades with a dismal and lamenting “Oohaho! Oohaho!”
The king hummed to himself as if chaffing with an unseen enemy: “Little Cossack man, little Cossack man, go gather up your rascals!”
The walls around the garden were mouldering and black. From the wilderness sounded an endlessly prolonged minor tone as from an æolian harp, and the king inquisitively shouldered in the door of the dwelling-house. This consisted of a single large and a half-dark room, and before the fireplace lay a heap of blood-stained clothing, which plunderers of corpses had taken from fallen Swedes. The door was thrown shut again by the cross-draught, and the king went to the stable buildings at the side. There was no door there, and a sound was now heard the more plainly. Within in the darkness lay a starved white horse bound to the iron loop of a wagon.
A lifted broadsword would not have checked the king, but the uncertain dusk caused the man of imagination to stand on the threshold, fearful of the dark. Yet he gave no sign of this, but beckoned the ensign. They stepped in down a steep stairway to a cellar. Here there was a spring, and as a stop-cock to the singing wind which stirred the water, a deaf Cossack with whip and reins, and without an idea of danger, was driving a manly figure in the uniform of a Swedish officer.
When they had loosed the rope and had bound the Cossack in the place of the prisoner, they recognized the Holsteiner, Feuerhausen, who had served as major in a regiment of dragoon recruits, but had been cut off by the Cossacks and harnessed as a draught animal for hoisting water.
He fell on his knees and stammered in broken Swedish: “Your Majesty! I gan’t pelief my eyes.... My gratitude....”