cloak around her.

So we sat and waited; and the moon sailed grandly overhead throwing
flakes of white on the dancing water to seaward; and save for the
lapping of water and occasional sounds from the fore-deck, there was
stillness--out of which an owl cried, thrice, with its long, strange,
mournful note, and then ceased; leaving the silence more silent.

Then, suddenly, from out the darkness, seemingly miles away, there rose,
and rose, and hung on the air, and slowly died away, a great cry in a
man's voice. Then there was silence once more for a moment. And now
began a confused dull rabble of sound that I knew well enough; with a
skin-moving swish in it like the whetting of knives. And there were far
sounds of voices, and sometimes a curious hollow drubbing, like a hammer
on the side of a ship; this, I could tell, was the sound of my Lord
Snore's great axe as it beat on the door, and when it ceased presently I
knew that the door was down.

Now, for a long time only the far sounds and the occasional voices came
to us; and the years grew long again, and I heard the water lapping
against the side of the ship.

Suddenly, out of the darkness and into the strip of moonlit beach that
lay between the edge of the black forest and the silvery ship, came
running a man, silently, and swaying as he ran, and just midway in the
moonlight, he stopped, ran round uncertainly twice in a little circle,
and then pitched forward with his face in the sand and lay still. The
maiden by me gave a little cry and hid her face on the edge of the
bulwark. Then we waited again and listened to the barking of dogs in
the distance; and so more years passed, and the lapping of the water
grew loud again.

Now began to come wounded men in pairs, stumbling groaningly over the
side, and soon with these began to come back other men out of the
darkness, unwounded, but bloody enough, and these waited in a little
crowd outside the ship panting, and wiping the sweat from their
foreheads, and leaving the prints of their hands on the planks where we
found them next morning. And, last, with a little knot of unwounded men
around him, came Lord Snore walking heavily, swinging his axe, with the
blood dripping from his shaggy foretop and from the ends of his hands.
He stood while the men slowly shoved off the ship, then plunging through
the water like horses and splashing it over their red armour and faces,
they all came clambering aboard, and throwing off their s