should reach the town, whilst at the same time he was
helping him into the dress of a Brother of Pity and arranging the hood
across his face.

"Hold your head well down," so ran the monk's rubric for the dread
office, "repeat in a loud voice '_Bring out your dead! Bring out your
dead!_' No more than that and no less. With the butt of your ox-staff
strike the doors whereon you see painted the red cross, and those that
remain will bring out whom the plague hath smitten."

The young man listened as in a dream. The oxen started at the friar's
gentle chirrup. The ox-staff was placed in Rollo's hand, and lo, he was
guiding the meek bent heads softly towards the town before he even
realised that he was now to encounter a foe far more terrible than any
he had ever faced in battle or at the rapier's point upon the field of
honour.

The trees were as solidly dark as black velvet above him. The oxen
padded softly over the well-trodden path. In the gloom he dropped his
goad, and only became conscious when he tried to pick it up that the
Basque had drawn over his hands a pair of huge gloves which reached down
almost to his wrists. These had been carefully tarred outside, and
doubtless furnished at least some protection against infection.

The great well-fed beasts, white oxen of the finest Castilian breed, a
gift of the Queen-Regent to the brethren, were under perfect control;
and though Rollo had only once or twice before handled the guiding
staff, he had not the least difficulty in conducting the cart towards
the town.

Indeed, so often had the animals taken the same road of late, that they
seemed to know their destination by instinct, and gave the tall young
monk in the hood no trouble whatever. The wheels, however, being of
solid wood of a style ancient as the Roman occupation, creaked with
truly Spanish _crescendo_ to the agony point. For in all countries
flowing with oil and wine no man affords so much as a farthing's worth
of grease for his waggon-wheels. But upon this occasion the lack was no
loss--nay, rather a gain. For even before Rollo's shout gained assurance
and sonorousness, the creaking of the wheels of the cart far-heard
scattered various groups of marauders about the streets of the town as
if it had been the wings of the angel of death himself.

"_Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!_"

Certainly it was a solemn and awful cry heard echoing through the
streets in the chilly hours of the night. Here and