The group stood aside for us to look on what they had found, and that was a man, fully armed in the Welsh way of Gerent’s guards, but slain by the well-aimed blow of a strong seax that was yet left where it had been driven home above the corselet.  There was a war bow and two more arrows lying at the foot of the rampart, as if they had been wrested from the hand of the archer and flung there.  The men had not seen these, but I looked for them at once when I saw that there was no bow on the slain man.

“Who is this?” Owen said gravely, and without looking closely as yet.

“It is Tregoz of the Dart, whom the king seeks,” one or two of the men said at once.

I had known that it must be he in my own mind before the name was spoken.  There fell a silence on the rest as the name was told, and all looked at my foster father.  There was plainly some fault in the watching of the rampart that had let the traitor find his way here at all.

“Which of you was it who slew him?” asked Owen.

“None of us, Lord.  We cannot tell who it may have been.  Even the sentry who keeps this beat is gone.”

“Doubtless it was he who slew him, and is himself wounded in the fosse.  Look for him straightway.”

There they hunted, but the man was not to be found.  Nor was it his weapon that had ended Tregoz.

Then Owen said in a voice that had grown very stern:  “Who was the sentry who should have been here?”

The men looked at one another, and the chief of them answered at last that the man was from Dartmoor, one of such a name.  And then one looked more closely at the arms Tregoz wore, and cried out that they were the very arms of the missing sentry, or so like them that one must wait for daylight to say for certain that they were not they.

It was plain enough then.  In such arms Tregoz could well walk through the village itself unnoticed, as one of the palace guards would be, and so when the time came he would climb from some hiding in the fosse and take the place of his countryman on the rampart, and the watchful captain would see but a sentry there and deem that all was well.

Yet this did not tell us who was the one who had wrestled with and slain him, and Owen told what had been done, while I went and brought the bow and arrows from the foot of the rampart, in hopes that they might tell us by mark or make if more than Tregoz and the sentry were in this business.  Then I looked at my window, and, though narrow, it was as fair a mark in the moonlight as one would need.  Without letting my shadow fall on the sleeper, it was possible to see my couch and the white furs on it, though it would be needful to raise the arm across the moonlight in the act of shooting.  It was all well planned, but it needed a first-rate bowman.

“It was surely Tregoz who shot,” one of the men said.  “The sentry who was here was a bungler with a bow.  None whom we know but Tregoz could have made sure of that mark, bright as the night is.  Well it was, Lord, that you were not sleeping in your wonted place.”