"'If I slay thee, thou hireling dog, as I have often slain thy clodpated countrymen in other days,' and the Frenchman laughed fiercely, 'by St. Denis! I will have one foe-man less on this side of Hell!'
"'Gott in Himmel! ach! mein tuyvel! mein--mein Gott!' gasped the Dutchman as he floundered beneath the heel of the vengeful and infuriated Frenchman, who was determined on destroying him, till a blow from the baton of an officer, stretched him almost senseless among the snow, where he was immediately grasped by the trumpeters, disrobed of his last remaining garment, and bound strongly to the halberts.
"Meanwhile the other prisoner had been pinioned and resolutely held by his escort, otherwise he would undoubtedly have fallen also upon Van Wandenberg, who choking with a tempest of passion that was too great to find utterance in words, had gathered up his rotund figure, and with an agility wonderful in a man of his years and vast obesity, so heavily armed, in a buff coat and jack-boots ribbed with iron, a heavy sword and cloak, clambered on the back of his horse, as a clown would climb up a wall; and with a visage alternating between purple and blue, by the effects of rage and strangulation, he surveyed the prisoner for a moment in silence, and there gleamed in his piggish gray eyes an expression of fury and pain, bitterness and triumph combined, and he was only able to articulate one word--
"On the handsome young Frenchman's dark curly hair, glistening with the whitening snow that fell upon it, and on his tender skin reddening in the frosty atmosphere, on the swelling muscles of his athletic form, on a half-healed sabre wound, and on the lineaments of a face that then expressed the extremity of mental agony, fell full the wavering light of the uplifted torches. The Dutch, accustomed to every species of extra-judicial cruelty by sea and land, looked on with the most grave stolidity and apathetic indifference; while I felt an astonishment and indignation that rapidly gave place to undisguised horror.
"The other prisoner uttered a groan that seemed to come from his very heart, and then covered his ears and eyes with his hands. Wielded by a muscular trumpeter, an immense scourge of many-knotted cords was brought down with one full sweep on the white back of the victim, and nine livid bars, each red, as if seared by a hot iron, rose under the infliction, and again the terrible instrument was reared by the trumpeter at the full stretch of his sinewy arm.