lordly and unsuspecting stag walk past
their forest lair.

"Shall we turn, my fair lord, or shall we carry on?" asked the
master-shipman, looking behind him with anxious eyes.

"Nay, we must carry on and play the part of the helpless merchant."

"But your pennons? They will see that we have two knights with us."

"Yet it would not be to a knight's honor or good name to lower his
pennon. Let them be, and they will think that we are a wine-ship for
Gascony, or that we bear the wool-bales of some mercer of the Staple. Ma
foi, but they are very swift! They swoop upon us like two goshawks on a
heron. Is there not some symbol or device upon their sails?"

"That on the right," said Edricson, "appears to have the head of an
Ethiop upon it."

"'Tis the badge of Tete-noire, the Norman," cried a seaman-mariner. "I
have seen it before, when he harried us at Winchelsea. He is a wondrous
large and strong man, with no ruth for man, woman, or beast. They say
that he hath the strength of six; and, certes, he hath the crimes of six
upon his soul. See, now, to the poor souls who swing at either end of
his yard-arm!"

At each end of the yard there did indeed hang the dark figure of a man,
jolting and lurching with hideous jerkings of its limbs at every plunge
and swoop of the galley.

"By St. Paul!" said Sir Nigel, "and by the help of St. George and Our
Lady, it will be a very strange thing if our black-headed friend does
not himself swing thence ere he be many hours older. But what is that
upon the other galley?"

"It is the red cross of Genoa. This Spade-beard is a very noted captain,
and it is his boast that there are no seamen and no archers in the world
who can compare with those who serve the Doge Boccanegra."

"That we shall prove," said Goodwin Hawtayne; "but it would be well,
ere they close with us, to raise up the mantlets and pavises as a screen
against their bolts." He shouted a hoarse order, and his seamen worked
swiftly and silently, heightening the bulwarks and strengthening them.
The three ship's anchors were at Sir Nigel's command carried into the
waist, and tied to the mast, with twenty feet of cable between, each
under the care of four seamen. Eight others were stationed with leather
water-bags to quench any fire-arrows which might come aboard, while
others were sent up the mast, to lie along the yard and drop stones or
shoot arrows as the occasion served.

"Let them be supplied with all that is heavy and we