"And chose badly, it seems," Nigel responded grimly. "Now before we proceed I must search you for any letters you may carry."
"I carry none!" said the Count, flushing, as Nigel rapidly passed his hands into his pockets, over his hose, and other vestments.
"As for your valise and holsters I can examine them later. Meantime you are my prisoner, and will be shot down if you attempt to escape!"
"But!" protested the Count.
"There is no 'but'!" said Nigel. "Be good enough to mount!"
The Count bit his moustache and mounted. Nigel, having first perched Elspeth on a horse, which he led, strode immediately in front, his left hand on the rein, his right hand holding his drawn sword in case of accidents.
The road was a mere bridle-track where single file was a necessity. On the right for a mile or so it lay along the steep slope of the rising ground, not so much precipitous as steep. For horses and men alike it was necessary for progress to follow the pathway. Every now and again cross paths came into view, but Elspeth knew the forest as if it had been the highroad and kept steadily on. Above them the high tree-tops towered, tall pines and straight slender beeches, whose foliage had learned to grow only upon the topmost boughs. Now and again they came to a broad clearing where clear sky was. Then the line of the ridge swept over to the east and the steepest declivities were to the left. The riders and Nigel looked down into the great hollows in the woodland, flanked by great naked boulders that stood up out of the sea of leaves, the countless heaping of unnumbered years. And now the moon was up and patches of white light streaked the boles of trees, and the leaves, and ceased to be, for the further darkness of the shadows.
Now the pathway leads up by zigzags. Elspeth whispers that they are now upon the Wartburg itself, and bids Nigel look down and out, and surely there in the moonlight he can see, a mile or two away, the outliers of the town of Eisenach, else hidden by another hill which juts between.
Nigel calls a halt, and, to the Count's chagrin, just concealed and no more, orders Blick to descend with the Count and the others to the camping-place without the town where the regiment should be.