ty for him, and two
of the volunteers had much difficulty in conveying him back to Haarlem,
where, however, he displayed the utmost fortitude by refusing to waste
his time in being examined and tended by the bone-setter, and declaring
that since he could not take an active part in the campaign against the
vervloekte malefactors he would give every moment of his time and every
faculty he possessed for the organisation of an effective corps of
soldiery capable of undertaking a successful punitive expedition.

He joined his father in the tap-room of the "Lame Cow," and though he
was obviously in great pain with his arm and shoulder which he had
hastily and perfunctorily tied up with his sash, he was untiring in his
suggestions, his advice, his offers of money and of well-considered
plans.

Unbeknown to anyone save to him, the Lord of Stoutenburg sat in a dark
recess of the tapperij deeply interested in all that was going on. He
knew, of course, every detail of the plot which Nicolaes Beresteyn had
hatched at his instigation and--hidden as he was in his obscure
corner--it pleased his masterful mind to think that the tangled skein of
this affair which these solemn and pompous burghers were trying to
unravel had been originally embroiled by himself.

He listened contemptuously and in silence to the wild and oft senseless
talk which went on around him; but when he caught sight of Diogenes
swaggering into the room in the wake of the painter Frans Hals he very
nearly betrayed himself.

Nicolaes Beresteyn too was dumbfounded. For the moment he literally
gasped with astonishment, and was quite thankful that his supposedly
dislocated shoulder furnished a good pretext for the string of oaths
which he uttered. But Diogenes, sublimely indifferent to the
astonishment of his patron, took a seat beside his friend at one of the
vacant tables and ordered a substantial supper with a bottle of very
choice wine wherewith to wash it down, all of which he evidently meant
to pay for with Nicolaes' money. The latter could do nothing but sit by
in grim silence while the man whom he had paid to do him service ate and
drank heartily, cracked jokes and behaved for all the world as if he
were a burgher of leisure plentifully supplied with money.

Time was going on: the subject of the expedition against the sea-wolves

had been fully discussed and certain resolutions arrived at, which only
lacked the assent of the burgomaster sitting in council a