��We have to go outside so I can show you what I discovered.��The genius of Lord Stair was anything but military, and soon led him into a dilemma. Instead of waiting, as he had first determined, for the reinforcements of Hessians and Hanoverians, he advanced up the river, with the intention of drawing supplies from Franconia. He advanced to Aschaffenberg, which he reached on the 16th of June; but Noailles had rapidly followed him, and adroitly seized on the fords of both the Upper and Lower Main, thus cutting off Stair both from his own stores at Hanau, and from the expected supplies of Franconia. At this critical moment King George arrived at the camp, and found Noailles lying in a strong position, and Stair cooped up with his army in a narrow valley between the wild and hilly forest of Spessart, which extends from Aschaffenberg to Dettingen and the river Main. To render his case the more desperate, he had quarrelled with Aremberg, who had let him pursue his march alone; and Stair now lay, with only thirty-seven thousand men, in the very grasp, as it were, of Noailles and his sixty thousand men.
That was how the chums were misled the night of Sandy��s birthday party. The trays had been emptied when they looked, and because the trays had just been used for tinted ice and were logically empty, they were fooled.��Look��toward shore!�� screamed Sandy.They laid Landor upon the ground, in the same patch of shade he had glanced at in coming by not five [Pg 281]minutes before. His glazed eyes stared back at the sky. There was nothing to be done for him. But Cairness was alive. They washed the blood from his face with water out of the canteens, and bound his head with a wet handkerchief. And presently he came back to consciousness and saw Landor stretched there, with the bluing hole in his brow, and the quiet there is no mistaking on his sternly weary face. And he turned back his head and lay as ashy and almost as still as the dead man, with a look on his own face more terrible than that of any death.��Took you long enough to answer!�� grumbled Jeff. ��What made you fool with that door and shut yourselves in?��