Rival Caesars by Desmond Dilg & Ragnar Redbeard & Arthur Desmond & Will Dilg

Author:Desmond Dilg & Ragnar Redbeard & Arthur Desmond & Will Dilg [Dilg, Desmond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-27T04:00:00+00:00

When the four soldiers returned to where Burr lay helpless, they bore him on the litter to a sheltered nook in a corner of the garden wall. There, wrapped in his cloak tired out and worn, he soon fell sound asleep, his lullaby being the sad soughing of the wind and the dull roaring of the sinking flames.

When morning dawned not the sign of an enemy could be seen. The blackened walls of the buildings stood up gaunt and bare. Inside heaps of debris smoked and smoldered, and every now and then portions of the walls fell in with a crash.

Some wounded horses were limping about, their legs hanging by ligaments of flesh and sinew to broken bones. They whinnied piteously in their pain and seemed to say “come and help us, come and help us.”

Bleak and cold and raw was the morning. The wind whistled and moaned through the trees disconsolately. Grey rushing clouds gathered in the North and a slight penetrating rain began to fall. The wind bore up the ashes of the fire, re-scattering them far and near in sooty whirls as if in stormy sardonic derision.

One of the soldiers walked smartly up and down in order to keep himself warm, and at the same time act as sentinel. The other three cooked a rough breakfast. One was busy boiling a kettle of coffee on the prong of a hay-fork over the embers of the house. An other was roasting a fat turkey on the end of a long pole thrust through the parlor window.

When the kettle boiled Holroyd walked across to where the women of the farm were shivering (along side of the barn walls) and offered each of them a cup of strong coffee with some corn cakes made in the ashes of their own home.

In their precipitate retreat from the sudden onslaught of Burr's troopers, the redcoats had forgotten the women and children, who thus escaped being carried off as hostages.

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