CHAPTER XXII

A Clever Stratagem

At that renowned name, the bandits eyed each other doubtfully, as if hardly able to believe that the greatest warrior of the age stood among them in the guise of a simple knight-errant. But one glance at the harsh but striking features which (as the great captain often said in jest) no man who had once seen them could ever forget, carried conviction to all; and in a moment the savage gang were pressing round him with shouts of rough welcome, the Black Wolf himself being the foremost.

“Let him go free, captain!” cried the robbers; “it were sin and shame to take ransom from _him_!”

“What talk ye of ransom, lads?” said the chief, with a gruff chuckle. “Here is no question of any man’s ransom but my own; for it is not he who is my captive, but I who am his.”

“What! did he overcome thee in single fight?” cried a dozen voices at once, in blank amazement; for never before had the dreaded Black Wolf been conquered, and his wild followers had never dreamed that he could be.

“Ay, that did he!” said the Wolf, with a thoroughly characteristic enjoyment of his conqueror’s prowess. “Marry, if ye doubt it, try him yourselves, any two of ye together; I’ll warrant he will find work for both!”

But the robbers seemed quite satisfied with his testimony, and made no offer to put it to the proof.

“Hark ye, comrades,” broke in Du Guesclin, “one of ye fetch me quickly a rough cloth or a wisp of straw, that I may rub down my good horse, which hath been sore toiled this day; and then, if it be supper-time with ye here, I would gladly eat a bit in your good company, for I am as hungry as a wolf in winter.”

The blunt heartiness of the great soldier’s address was just to the taste of these rough men, on whom fine words and courtly phrases would have been thrown away. His caring for his good steed, too, before thinking of his own needs, was what the rudest of them could appreciate; and in a trice he was seated among them as an honoured guest, as much at home in this den of thieves as at the brilliant Court of Brittany.

“Now, lads,” cried he, as this strange picnic ended, “in requital of your good cheer, I will tell ye of a goodly sport that I have devised, which ye are the very men to carry out. With a few score tall fellows like you to aid me, I doubt not to bring it to a prosperous issue; and if I do, it will be a jest for the old wives of Bretagne to tell their grand-children for many a day after we are dead and gone.”

His project was plainly received by the outlaws as a first-rate joke; for, as he expounded it, his words were half-drowned by peal after peal of laughter; and, ere he ended, all the band (the Black Wolf included) had vowed to stand by him through thick and thin.

“Marry, this is the weather to bring to remembrance Christmas-tide in Merry England, where I would we all were now. There, at least, if we had cold and frost, we had good cheer as well; but in this heaven-forsaken land of briars and wolves (beshrew it and all that pertaineth to it!) we have none of the good cheer, and a double portion of cold to atone for the lack of it!”

So growled, as well as his chattering teeth would let him, the half-frozen gate-porter of Fougeray Castle (a Breton fortress lately captured by a detachment of the Duke of Lancaster’s English army) on a bleak, gloomy winter evening.

“For my part,” grunted the stout English archer whom he addressed, “had I but fire enow to keep the blood from freezing in my veins, I could make shift without the cheer thou speak’st of. Ere long we shall be at our last faggot, unless our captain and his men bring back some wood from their foraging this night.”

“That were an unlikely chance,” muttered the porter, with a gloomy shake of his grey head; “for he who tarries to cut wood when Bertrand du Guesclin is abroad, may be himself cut down instead. But at what look’st thou so earnestly, comrade?”

“Methinks my wish is granted as soon as spoken, like him that had a fairy godmother in the old tale,” grinned the archer; “for yonder, if my eyes deceive me not, come six stout peasants, each with a lusty load of faggots!”

He was right, and even the crabbed old porter’s sour face brightened as he saw that not only were the broad shoulders of the advancing peasants freighted with faggots, but that they were dragging with them a rude “sled,” piled high with logs and bundles of firewood.

The drawbridge being down for the convenience of the English commandant (who was expected back every moment with his hundred foragers), the six grey-frocked, slouch-hatted, long-haired fellows came right up to the gate, and the foremost (a short, sturdy, clumsy man very much like a bear on hind legs) said humbly, in rude and broken French—

“Good sirs, if ye need wood, I pray ye of your grace to buy this that we have brought. Such valiant gentlemen, with the spoil of all France in their pouches, will not grudge a penny to us poor fellows!”

“Marry, ye have brought your wares to the right market!” laughed the archer. “Bring in your load, and when our captain returns (as he will speedily) I warrant he pays ye in right English fashion for such store of winter fuel.”

With many a grunt and gasp (as if their strength were well nigh spent with dragging that heavy load up the steep path to the castle gate) the peasants tugged their sled forward. But, just inside the gate, they fairly stuck fast, leaving sled and log-pile (quite by accident, of course) just under the grate of the portcullis, which was thus kept from falling to bar the entrance.

“Ho there, lads!” cried the archer to three others who were lounging about the courtyard, “come and aid me and Peter Gateward to drag in this load, since these lazy fellows find it too hard for them!”

But as he spoke, down he went, felled to the earth as if crushed by a falling mountain; and the foremost peasant, flinging off his coarse frock, appeared in full armour. A tall man beside him, doing the same, uttered a cry like the howl of a wolf, which was instantly answered by the bursting of a throng of armed men from their ambush in the thickets below.

The next moment the three other archers and the porter fell in turn; but the staunch old warder, mortally hurt as he was, had clutched with his dying hand the cord of the alarm-bell, and rung a peal that startled the whole garrison. The first men who came panting up made a frantic effort to let fall the portcullis; but the piled-up wood checked it midway, and in a moment more the shouting assailants burst in like a wave, echoing their leader’s war-cry of “Notre Dame, Du Guesclin!”

Surprised, half-armed, without a leader, most of the English were beaten down and made prisoners almost ere they could draw weapon. A few made a desperate stand in the inner gateway, and fairly hemmed in Du Guesclin and the Black Wolf, who had charged headlong through it; but the two leaders, standing grimly back to back against them all, held their own till their men, having cleared the courtyard, came rushing to their aid; and so the castle was won.

But hardly was all over, when a distant trumpet blast came echoing from below, and the English commandant and his men were seen returning with their booty, in a careless, straggling fashion that told its own tale to Bertrand’s keen eye.

Wounded as he was by a severe slash in the face, the hero sallied out upon them at once with a body of picked men, disguised in the dress of their English captives; and the trick was perfectly successful. The commandant himself fell by Du Guesclin’s hand, and few of his men escaped death or capture.

“Well, lads,” cried Bertrand, as he and his wild recruits sat down to the meal prepared for the English leader, with many a hoarse laugh at this complete turning of the tables, “ye have right gallantly begun your new service, and a new service deserveth a new name. Henceforth let all men call ye ‘Du Guesclin’s Woodmen.’”

And the ex-outlaws, with shouts of approving laughter, accepted the title that was to make them famous in history.