There certainly was enough, and more; yet at this suggestion an indignant murmur could not be suppressed.

“Though I never dispute your wisdom in anything, that appears to me to be little better than desecration,” Valbrand declared, frankly.

With an effort the Norman roused himself.  “It will not be necessary,” he said, absently.  “I know how to make a liquid out of barks that will have a dark color and suffer no damage from water.”

He did not notice the expression that flared up in Kark’s eyes; nor did he hear Helga’s gasp, nor feel Sigurd’s foot.  His gaze fell again to the floor in moody abstraction.

The chief answered briefly to the murmurs:  “It is unadvisable to oppose my whim for writing in wine; who knows but I might exchange it for a fancy to write in blood?  Bring hither the vadmal, thrall, and we will lose no more precious moments.”

Was ever monkish work begun in more unchurch-like surroundings?  Alwin wondered, a festal board for a desk and a wine-cup for an ink-horn!  The brawling crew along the benches drank and sang and rattled dice in their nightly carousal; and, in a corner, Lodin wrestled with the well-grown bear-cub before a circle of cheering spectators.  The firelight flickered over the trophy-laden walls, picking out now a severed paw and now a grinning skull, until the whole place seemed a ghastly shrine of savagery.

The warrior-scribe wrote with painful slowness; and more than once, in trying to catch some of Helga’s chatter across the fire, he wrote such twisted sentences that it was impossible to unravel them when he came to retranslate.  Yet he did write.  Ploddingly, haltingly, clumsily, he still caught the fleeting thoughts as they sped, and fastened them down, in purple and white, to last so long as one thread should lie beside another.  No longer need anyone torture his brain to remember whether the tallest maple-trees stood beyond the river’s second bend to the left or its fourth to the right, or between the third turning to the right and the fifth to the left.  The little fox-hair brush sprang upon the fact and pinioned it, a prisoner for the remainder of time.

The chief’s pleasure was almost too great to be controlled.  He went at the work as a starving man goes at food, and he hung over it as a drunkard hangs over his dram.  Tyrker rose with considerable bustle to take his departure for the other house; and Vaibrand stamped about noisily as he renewed the torches on the walls; but the monotonous steadiness of the dictation never faltered.  One by one, the men about Leif dropped off, snoring; and he heeded it no more than he did the soughing of the wind through the grove.  By and by, even the fresh torches began to snore, in angry sputters; and the fire, which had long since begun to wink drowsily, shut its last red eye and lay in total oblivion.

Leif sat up reluctantly, and stretched his arms over his head with a regretful sigh.  “My mind comes out of it as stubbornly as Sigmund’s sword came out of the tree trunk.  We will return to it the first thing in the morning.  You have done me a service which I shall never forget while my mind lives in me.”