“That is so, Malcolm,” the colonel said warmly.  “You have borne yourself well and bravely, and you have got an old head on those young shoulders of yours.  You are as full of plans and stratagems as if you had been a campaigner for the last half century; and no man, even in the Green Brigade, no, not Hepburn himself, could have held that church tower more ably than you did.  It will be a good tale to tell the king as we ride on the march tomorrow, for he loves a gallant deed, and the more so when there is prudence and good strategy as well as bravery.  He has more than once asked if you have been getting into any new adventures, and seemed almost surprised when I told him that you were doing your duty with your company.  He evidently regards it as your special mission to get into harebrained scrapes.  He regards you, in fact, as a pedagogue might view the pickle of the school.”

There was a general laugh at Malcolm’s expense.

“I don’t know how it is I am always getting into scrapes,” the lad said half ruefully when the laugh subsided.  “I am sure I don’t want to get into them, colonel, and really I have never gone out of my way to do so, unless you call my march to help the Count of Mansfeld going out of my way.  All the other things have come to me without any fault of my own.”

“Quite so, Graheme,” the colonel said smiling; “that’s always the excuse of the boy who gets into scrapes.  The question is, Why do these things always happen to you and to nobody else?  If you can explain that your whole case is made out.  But don’t take it seriously, Malcolm,” he continued, seeing that the lad looked really crestfallen.

“You know I am only laughing, and there is not a man here, including myself, who does not envy you a little for the numerous adventures which have fallen to your lot, and for the courage and wisdom which you have shown in extricating yourself from them.”

“And now, please, will you tell me, colonel,” Malcolm said more cheerfully, “why we are turning our backs upon Ingolstadt and are marching away without taking it?  I have been away for ten days, you know, and it is a mystery to me why we are leaving the only enemy between us and Vienna, after having beaten him so heartily a fortnight since, without making an effort to rout him thoroughly.”

“Maximilian’s position is a very strong one, my lad, and covered as he is by the guns of Ingolstadt it would be even a harder task to dislodge him than it was to cross the Lech in his teeth.  But you are wrong; his is not the only army which stands between us and Vienna.  No sooner is old Tilly dead than a greater than Tilly appears to oppose us.  Wallenstein is in the field again.  It has been known that he has for some time been negotiating with the emperor, who has been imploring him to forgive the slight that was passed upon him before, and to again take the field.

“Wallenstein, knowing that the game was in his hands, and that the emperor must finally agree to any terms which he chose to dictate, has, while he has been negotiating, been collecting an army; and when the emperor finally agreed to his conditions, that he was at the conclusion of the peace to be assured a royal title and the fief of a sovereign state, he had an army ready to his hand, and is now on the point of entering Bohemia with 40,000 men.”