hey will come to meet us if they have any business with
us."

So they turn down the Fleet. "Now they have caught sight of us,"
said Skarphedinn, "for lo! they turn their path elsewhither, and
now we have no other choice than to run down and meet them."

"Many men," said Kari, "would rather not lie in wait if the
balance of force were not more on their side than it is on ours;
they are eight, but we are five."

Now they turn down along the Fleet, and see a tongue of ice
bridging the stream lower down and mean to cross there.

Thrain and his men take their stand upon the ice away from the
tongue, and Thrain said, "What can these men want? They are
five, and we are eight."

"I guess," said Lambi Sigurd's son, "that they would still run
the risk though more men stood against them."

Thrain throws off his cloak, and takes off his helm.

Now it happened to Skarphedinn, as they ran down along the Fleet,
that his shoe-string snapped asunder, and he stayed behind.

"Why so slow, Skarphedinn?" quoth Grim.

"I am tying my shoe," he says.

"Let us get on ahead," says Kari; "methinks he will not be slower
than we."

So they turn off to the tongue, and run as fast as they can.
Skarphedinn sprang up as soon as he was ready, and had lifted his
axe, "the ogress of war," aloft, and runs right down to the
Fleet. But the Fleet was so deep that there was no fording it
for a long way up or down.

A great sheet of ice had been thrown up by the flood on the other
side of the Fleet as smooth and slippery as glass, and there
Thrain and his men stood in the midst of the sheet.

Skarphedinn takes a spring into the air, and leaps over the
stream between the icebanks, and does not check his course, but
rushes still onwards with a slide. The sheet of ice was very
slippery, and so he went as fast as a bird flies. Thrain was
just about to put his helm on his head; and now Skarphedinn bore
down on them, and hews at Thrain with his axe, "the ogress of
war," and smote him on the head, and clove him down to the teeth,
so that his jaw-teeth fell out on the ice. This feat was done
with such a quick sleight that no one could get a blow at him; he
glided away from them at once at full speed. Tjorvi, indeed,
threw his shield before him on the ice, but he leapt over it, and
still kept his feet, and slid quite to the end of the sheet of
ice.

There Kari and his brothers came to meet him.

"This was done like a man," says Kari.

"You