But he had not taken a step inside before he hastily withdrew.

"There is something there," he cried--"something that breathes. A light,
Gil."

One of the four lit a lantern from his flint and poked it within. It
revealed the foul floor and the rotting acorns, and in the far corner,
on a bed of withered boughs, something dark which might be a man. They
stood still and listened. There was the sound of painful breathing, and
then the gasp with which a sick man wakens. A figure disengaged itself
from the shadows. Seeing it was but one man, the four pushed inside, and
the last pulled the door to behind him.

"What have we here?" the leader cried. A man had dragged himself to his
feet, a short, square fellow who held himself erect with a grip on a
side-post. His eyes were vacant, dazzled by the light and also by pain.
He seemed to have had hard usage that day, for his shaggy locks were
matted with blood from a sword-cut above his forehead, one arm hung
limp, and his tunic was torn and gashed. He had no weapons but a knife
which he held blade upwards in the hollow of his big hand.

The four who confronted him were as ill-looking a quartet as Duke
William's motley host could show. One, the leader, was an unfrocked
priest of Rouen; one was a hedge-robber from the western marches who
had followed Alan of Brittany; a third had the olive cheeks and the long
nose of the south; and the fourth was a heavy German from beyond the
Rhine. They were the kites that batten on the offal of war, and the
great battle on the seashore having been won by better men, were
creeping into the conquered land for the firstfruits of its plunder.

"An English porker," cried the leader. "We will have the tusks off him."
Indeed, in the wild light the wounded man, with his flat face and forked
beard, had the look of a boar cornered by hounds.

"'Ware his teeth," said the one they called Gil. "He has a knife in his
trotter."

The evil faces of the four were growing merry. They were worthless
soldiers, but adepts in murder. Loot was their first thought, but after
that furtive slaying. There seemed nothing to rob here, but there was
weak flesh to make sport of.

Gil warily crept on one side, where he held his spear ready. The
ex-priest, who had picked up somewhere a round English buckler, gave the
orders. "I will run in on him, and take his stroke, so you be ready to
close. There is nothing to be feared from the swine. See, he is blooded
and faint