United States or Benin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"The enemy's scouts will be looking up stragglers," and after a hasty meal he, with Neville and Zenas, rode away in the darkness, to join the rearguard of Vincent's retreating army. They had scarcely been gone five minutes when a loud knocking was heard at the front door of the house, and, immediately after, the trampling of feet in the hall.
But when he found him to be as good as his word, and to have entered into the country of Sardis, he made great haste after him, and by great marches of his horse, overtaking the loose stragglers who were pillaging the country, he cut them off.
"A place like this is sure to have a lot of stragglers hunting around it. Bad characters. You understand?" She could not understand why he should make a mystery of it; but then, he was almost as strange as her father. His careful English and his ragged clothes were typical of him inside and out. "You have a gun there in your holster. Can you use it?" "Yes." "Try it."
Yet I had no faith the man was out seeking British stragglers, for had he been despatched on such a mission he would have had at least a squad of soldiers with him. Then what? The probability was that he was either riding to Elmhurst, or to some rendezvous with Fagin.
Fortunately, some platoons which Davoust had rallied, and the appearance of another troop of his stragglers, attracted the enemy's attention. Mortier availed himself of it. He gave orders to the three thousand men he had still remaining to retreat slowly in the face of their fifty thousand enemies. "Do you hear, soldiers?" cried General Laborde, "the marshal orders ordinary time!
By the time the whole of the stragglers, who had persisted in the chase, had come up, there might have been about fifty or sixty resolute men, each intent upon securing the person of one whom they felt, while in existence, would continue to be a terror to all the weaker and dearer portions of their domestic circles. There was a pause of several minutes.
Several parties in army overcoats shuffle uneasily up the street, only to fall into the clutches of a companion patrol that pops up as suddenly around the next corner beyond. "Rounding up the stragglers," thinks the colonel, with a quiet smile of approval, and, like the soldier he is, he finds time to look on a moment and watch the manner in which the work is done.
This made me think that it might be possible, if one unharnessed some of the many carts which followed the army, to fix them in the river in a line, one after the other, to make a sort of causeway for the infantrymen, something which would greatly ease the flow of the mass of stragglers who the next day would be crowding round the entries to the bridges.
I inspected the harbor and its goodly basin with nothing in it and certain pink and blue houses, which surround it, and then, joining the last stragglers, I clambered up the side of the cliff to the downs. The races had already begun, and the ring of spectators was dense.
On the eastern border Marshal Wade, with a large force, was advancing upon Edinburgh; and all along the frontier, parties of militia, volunteers, and partizans were in arms to suppress insurrection, and apprehend such stragglers from the Highland army as had been left in England.