Then he strode away through the people, with
curses on his white lips and the veins of his squat forehead large
and dark.

It was midnight before the crowds had broken up and straggled away to
their tents, but the sun of this northern land was still half over
the horizon, and its dull red glow was on the waters of the lake that
lay to the west of the valley. In the dim light of an hour later,
when the hills of Thingvellir slept under the cloud shadow that was
their only night, Stephen Orry stood with the Governor's daughter by
the door of the Thingvellir parsonage, for Jorgen's company were the
parson's guests. He held out the champion's belt to her and said,
"Take it back, for if I keep it the man and his kinsmen will follow
me all the days of my life."

She answered him that it was his, for he had won it, and until it was
taken from him he must hold it, and if he stood in peril from the
kinsmen of any man let him remember that it was she, daughter of the
Governor himself, who had given it. The air was hushed in that still
hour, not a twig or a blade rustling over the serried face of that
desolate land as far as the wooded rifts that stood under the snowy
dome of the Armann fells. As she spoke there was a sharp noise near
at hand, and he started; but she rallied him on his fears, and
laughed that one who had felled the blustering champion of that day
should tremble at a noise in the night.

There was a wild outcry in Thingvellir the next morning, Patricksen,
the Westmann islander, had been murdered. There was a rush of the
people to the place where his body had been found. It lay like a rag
across the dyke that ran between the parsonage and the church. On the
dead man's face was the look that all had seen there when last night
he flung down the belt between his adversary and the Governor's
daughter, crying, "keep it." But his sullen eyes were glazed, and
stared up without the quivering of a lid through the rosy sunlight;
the dark veins on his brow were now purple, and when they lifted him
they saw that his back was broken.

Then there was a gathering at the foot of the Mount, with the parson
for judge, and nine men of those who had slept in the tents nearest
to the body for witnesses and jury. Nothing was discovered. No one
had heard a sound throughout the night. There was no charge to put
before the law-givers at Althing. The kinsmen of the dead man cast
dark looks at Stephen Orry, but he gave never a sign. Next