s as of human creatures in hell.

"Lord have mercy upon him!" her lips, cold and white, murmured vaguely
and insistently, "Lord have mercy upon him! Lord have mercy upon us
all!"

CHAPTER XLI

"VENGEANCE IS MINE"

It was like a man possessed of devils that the Lord of Stoutenburg ran
out through the mist toward the molens.

The grey light of this winter's morning had only vaguely pierced the
surrounding gloom, and the basement beneath the molens still looked
impenetrably dark. Dark and silent! the soldier--foreign mercenaries and
louts--had vanished in the fog, arms hastily thrown down littered the
mud-covered ground, swords, pistols, muskets, torn clothing, here and
there a neck-cloth, a steel bonnet, a bright coloured sash. Stoutenburg
saw it all, right through the gloom, and he ground his teeth together to
smother a cry of agonised impotence.

Only now and then a ghostly form flitted swift and silent among the
intricate maze of beams, a laggard left behind in the general scramble
for safety, or a human scavenger on the prowl for loot. Now and then a
groan or a curse came from out the darkness, and a weird, shapeless,
moving thing would crawl along in the mud like some creeping reptile
seeking its lair. But Stoutenburg looked neither to right nor left. He
paid no heed to these swiftly fleeting ghostlike forms. He knew well
enough that he would find silence here, that three dozen men--cowards
and mercenaries all--had been scattered like locusts before a gale.
Overhead he heard the tramping of feet, his friends--Beresteyn,
Heemskerk, van Does--were making ready for flight. His one scheme of
vengeance--that for which he had thirsted and plotted and sinned--had
come to nought, but he had yet another in his mind--one which, if
successful, would give him no small measure of satisfaction for the
failure of the other.

And ahead the outline of the hastily improvised gallows detached itself
out of the misty shroud, and from the Lord of Stoutenburg's throat there
came a fierce cry of joy which surely must have delighted all the demons
in hell.

He hurried on, covering with swift eager steps the short distance that
separated him from the gibbet.

He called loudly to Jan, for it seemed to him as if the place was
unaccountably deserted. He could not see Jan nor yet the prisoner, and
surely Piet the Red had not proved a coward.

The solid beams above and around him threw back his call in
reverberating echoes.