After Henry had reported the situation to Walker upon his return to the Manor House, the Captain waited before deciding how to proceed in the hope that Young or one of the scouts that had followed in his wake would soon return with a report of their own. When half an hour had passed without any sign of them he had no choice but to deal with the bandits whose location he was actually sure of. He was nearly absolutely sure that the hostages were with the smaller party of bandits that were hopefully still being followed by Young.
However, he wouldn't be doing his job correctly if he didn't assume it was possible that they weren’t or at the very least that the bandits had split the hostages between the both of them. Either way though, it was likely that the two parties were now as far apart from each other as it was physically possible to be in the time that had past since they split up.
The campsite where Henry and the others had tracked the bandits to was located in a small grove of trees just off the main route between our employers Lone Shadow Manor and the neighbouring Sky Creek Manor. From all indications, it was only a temporary camp and it would be vacated long before any of our forces could reach it.
It was likely that once they awoke they would continue on down the road to Sky Creek Manor but they could of course at any point head of road in any number of different directions. Doing so would slow them down of course but it would do the same to us. They were somewhat restricted by two things, firstly, the presence of a river to the south of them that couldn’t be easily crossed until the next bridge about a day's travel away from their current position. Secondly, a dense forest of oak and elm arose to the north of them not all that far from the grove of trees they had spent the night at. Catching up with them before they could cross that bridge while not impossible would require a force march of our mainly infantry force that would leave them far too tired to be in any shape to fight for any length of time.
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This meant that our best bet would be to somehow slow them down enough to allow us to catch them up. Hopefully, this would occur without them scattering to the four winds and making our task all that much harder. The plan that Captain Walker came up with was to supply a dozen or so of our men with mounts and have them get ahead of the bandits and then have them trick the bandits into thinking they were a larger force than they actually were.
His hope was that this would scare them into turning back the way they had come. It was of course likely that they would head off road and try as best they could to vanish and we would be forced to go in after them. The captain was counting on the likelihood that when he had split his men up the bandit leader had made sure the most competent of his men were with himself and left the screwups and dregs of his band to their own fates.
While the Captain thought it unlikely that the bandits would try and make their way back to their winter camp he couldn’t rule it out. Thus in case he was wrong the messenger informed me that I was to secure the camp to the best of my ability. In the eventuality that the bandits did try and return I was to keep my force hidden within the camp for as long as possible and ambush them on their return.
Personally, I though that depending on the intelligence of whoever the bandit leader had put in command of the distraction party we mightn’t actually be wasting our time. I thus set about preparing for that eventuality with gusto and I managed to infect those under me with the same.