“You saw it?  Saints be with us!  You saw them?” he whispered to Brother Thomas.

“Fool, had I not seen, would I not have given the word?  Get you gone, all the sort of you, there is a fey man in this company, be he who he will.  Wander your own ways, and if ever one of you dogs speak to me again, in field, or street, or market, or ever mention this night . . . ye shall have my news of it.  Begone!  Off!”

“Nay, but, Brother Thomas, saw’st thou what we saw?  What sight saw’st thou?”

“What saw I?  Fools, what should I have seen, but an outrider, and he a King’s messenger, sent forward to warn the rest by his fall, if he fell, or to raise the country on us, if he passed, and if afterward they passed us not.  They were men wary in war, and travelling on the Dauphin’s business.  Verily there was no profit in them.”

“And that was all?  We saw other things.”

“What I saw was enough for me, or for any good clerk of St. Nicholas, and of questions there has been more than enough.  Begone! scatter to the winds, and be silent.”

“And may we not put the steel in that Scotch dog who delayed us?  Saints or sorcerers, their horses must have come down but for him.”

Brother Thomas caught me up, as if I had been a child, in his arms, and tossed me over the ditch-bank into the wood, where I crashed on my face through the boughs.

“Only one horse would have fallen, and that had brought the others on us.  The Scot is safe enough, his mouth is well shut.  I will have no blood to-night; leave him to the wolves.  And now, begone with you:  to Fierbois, if you will; I go my own road—­alone.”

They wandered each his own way, sullen and murmuring, starved and weary.  What they had seen or fancied, and whether, if the rest saw aught strange, Brother Thomas saw nought, I knew not then, and know not till this hour.  But the tale of this ambush, and of how they that lay in hiding held their hands, and fled—­having come, none might say whence, and gone, whither none might tell—­is true, and was soon widely spoken of in the realm of France.

The woods fell still again, save for the babble of the brook, and there I lay, bound, and heard only the stream in the silence of the night.

There I lay, quaking, when all the caitiffs had departed, and the black, chill night received me into itself.  At first my mind was benumbed, like my body; but the pain of my face, smarting with switch and scratch of the boughs through which I had fallen, awoke me to thought and fear.  I turned over to lie on my back, and look up for any light of hope in the sky, but nothing fell on me from heaven save a cold rain, that the leafless boughs did little to ward off.  Scant hope or comfort had I; my whole body ached and shuddered, only I did not thirst, for the rain soaked through the accursed napkin on my mouth, while the dank earth, with its graveyard smell, seemed