For his part, Jack understood that no force of cavalry as lordly, as magnificent, as the Winged Hussars could possibly exist, even for a single day, without a vast multitude of especially miserable peasants to make it all possible, and that peasants in such large numbers could never be kept so miserable for so long unless the lords of Poland-Lithuania were unusually cruel men. Indeed, after John Sobieski's vivid crossing of the Danube a gray fog of wretches filtered out of the woods and congealed on the river's northern bank. Jack didn't want to be one of 'em. So he went and found Herr Augsburg, sitting on an empty barley-cart surrounded by his profits: bills of exchange drawn on trading-houses in Genoa, Venice, Lyons, Amsterdam, Seville, London, piled up high on the cart's plankage and weighed down with stones. Mounting up onto the wagon, Jack the Soldier became, for a quarter of an hour, Jack the Actor. In the bad French that Herr Augsburg more or less understood, he spoke of the impending Apocalypse before the gates of Vienna, and of his willingness, nay, eagerness, to die in the midst of same, and his prayerful hope that he might at least take a single Turk down with him, or barring that, perhaps inflict some kind of small wound on a Turk, viz. by jabbing at him with a pointed stick or whatever he might have handy, so that said Turk might be distracted or slowed down long enough for some other soldier of Christendom, armed with a real weapon, such as a musket, to actually take aim at, and slay, that selfsame Turk. This was commingled with a great deal of generally Popish-sounding God-talk and Biblical-sounding quotations that Jack claimed he'd memorized from the Book of Revelation.