To the rescue...again

A day or so of travel sees the party working their way long a forest lined road. Suddenly arrows fly out from either side of the road. Alane takes a hit, one bounces off the heavily armoured Urgim and the others miss. Falandar jumps off his mule and draws his bow. Urgim turns his mule into the forest and charges, Andreus does the same but on the opposite side of the road. Alexa dismounts and follows Andreus. Cloaking herself in magic Alane sneaks into the forest and locates one of the attackers. She succeeds in sneaking up to the cloaked human and promptly slits his throat. Urgim in meanwhile has located a second attacker and is whaling on him. Falandar takes a hit from an arrow and decides to play possum on the road. On the other side of the road Andreus and Alexa engage the 3rd and 4th attackers in combat.

The combat is short lived, the bandits being no match for the heroes. Falandar sees a 5th bandit take to the woods and Alane manages to hit him with a magic dart but he continues to run away deeper into the woods. The group decides not to follow, loot the corpses and continue on down the road.

A couple of hours later Andreus & Urgim hear someone crying in the bushes alongside the road. Heading into the woods they find a small human child. Coaxing the boy back to the road they hear his tale of woe. His family farm was attacked and overrun by bandits and his family captured. Many of his neighbours suffered the same fate. The boy managed to escape the bandit's camp a few days ago and has been wandering the wood since.

Alexa loudly declares that party should just leave the boy behind and that they cannot stop for  every snivelling brat they find. The rest of the party disagrees and they decide to see if they can rescue the boy's family. Alexa follows reluctantly.

Several hours later, the party finally tracks down the bandits camp. A quick recon turns up two guards, 8 other bandits pottering around the camp and a wooden pen holding 20 beaten and down trodden captives.
Once again Alane uses her magic to sneak up and dispatch the guards and the rest of the party swarm the camp. Once again the bandits fall quickly to heroes.

As they free the captives from the pen (and reunite the boy with his family) a man charges Alane and tries to strangle her, all the while ranting about the party spoiling his plan to free his family from the mine. Alexa pries the man off Alane and he takes off into the woods.

The captives explain that they were been taken to work on a mine that was run by the bandits and that the man wanted to be captured so that he could get into the camp to try free his family.

The party loot the bodies and discover that the bandits had a large number of gold nuggets and coin amongst them. Intrigued by this the party decides that perhaps they should investigate the mine...to rescue the slaves of course.

The captives arm themselves with the bandits discarded weapons and equipment and shuffle off into the woods making their way home.