hrewdness and
valor, and when that was impossible, eluding them with equal shrewdness.
During that first campaign he destroyed many fortified places, won many
fights against superior numbers of regular troops, and killed far more
soldiers for the enemy than he had under his own command. Failing to
conquer him by force or strategy, his foes fell back upon the confident
hope of starving him during the winter, for he must pass the winter in
the forests, with no bases of supply to draw upon for either food or
ammunition. But in indulging this hope his enemies forgot that the crown
and glory of his achievements in the field had been his marvellous
fertility of resource. The very qualities which had made him formidable
in fight were his safeguard for the winter. He knew quite as well as
they did that he must live all winter in the woods surrounded by foes,
and, knowing the difficulty of doing so, he gave his whole mind to the
question of how to do it.

He began during the harvest to make his preparations. He explored all
the caves in the mountains, and selected the most available ones for use
as magazines, taking care to have them in all parts of the mountains, so
that if cut off from one he could draw upon another. In these caves he
stored great quantities of grain and other provisions, and during the
winter, whenever he needed meal, some of his men, who were millers,
would carry grain to some lonely country mill and grind it. To prevent
this, the king's officers ordered that all the country mills should be
disabled and rendered unfit for use; but before the order could be
executed, Cavalier directed some of his men, who were skilled
machinists, to disable two or three of the mills by carrying away the
essential parts of their machinery and storing them in his caves. Then,
when he wanted meal, his machinists had only to replace the machinery in
some disabled mill, and remove it again after his millers had done the
necessary grinding. His bakers made use of farmers' ovens to bake bread
in, and when the king's soldiers, hearing of this, destroyed the ovens,
Cavalier sent his masons--for he had all sorts of craftsmen in his
ranks--to rebuild them.

Having two powder-makers with him, he collected saltpetre, burned willow
twigs for charcoal, and made all the powder he needed in his caves.
Before doing so he had been obliged to resort to many devices in order
to get powder, sometimes disguising himself as a merchant and going int