Erling laughed.  “Maybe.  But they have slain ten of this party.  I have no mind to hear them whistling about my ears again.”

“Again?” said I.

“Oh ay; they had a shot or two at me yonder.  The arrows came from nowhere and missed me, so it did not seem worth while to call you.  I could not see any one.”

Now it seemed to me that I had found a cool and valiant man in this Dane.

“I think that I should have wanted to take cover,” I said.  “These are perilous folk to have to do with.  I wonder what became of them?”

“Gone into the mounds we saw,” said he.  “Betimes in our land men have seen such mounds raised, as it were, on pillars at night, and under them halls full of dancing trolls.  But if the seer will go near them, all is gone.  And mostly thereafter he dies.”

“Not many trolls could get under those mounds we saw,” I said.  “See, there are more here; they are too small for dwellings.”

There was indeed one of the heaps of earth close at hand to us, and Werbode rode toward it to see that none of the wild men lurked in its shelter.  He reached it, and then his horse started and leaped aside, almost falling; and through a rattle of falling stones my comrade called to the steed to “hold up.”

Whereon we supposed, of course, that he had been served as the horses of the thane had been crippled, and Erling and I ran to him, sword in hand, bidding the others go on.  But when we came to the side of Werbode, we found him staring into a pit which seemed to have opened under the weight of his horse; and there was no sign of other danger.

“Strange folk these,” he said.  “I suppose this is a trap.  The ground over it was as solid as anywhere, to all seeming.  I was nigh into it.”

The pit was ten feet deep or so, and it was plain that out of it had come what made the mound, though one could not see how.  When I looked in I saw that the ground had given way over the roof of a passage hewn in the soft chalk, and that the opening of it must have fallen in long ago.  The twisted stems of the sparse heather on the mound and all around it told of years, if not of long ages, that had passed undisturbed.

“There is the trolls’ house,” said Erling, shrinking back somewhat.

The level sunlight showed me walls of dull gray chalk, with the marks of the pick on them still.  There was a layer of black and white flints bedded in either wall, halfway up, and on the floor were piled stones chosen from it carefully.  I wondered who had handled them, and when.  Erling moved a little aside, and a shaft of sunlight darted down the passage and reached its end, and showed me those who had wrought here.

Two white skeletons sat against the wall, with a pile of flints between them.  There was a lamp hewn from chalk on the top of that, and the stain of its smoky flame was on the wall behind it.  One man had a pick made of the brow tine of an antler, greater than any which the red deer carry nowadays, across his knees, and another like pick lay by the bones of the other skeleton.  That one had a broken thigh, and he seemed to bend over it in pain.