something troubling the brown
horse. "Go and look well about him." The servants went out, and they
went to their hiding holes. The servants rummaged well, and did not
find a thing. They returned and they told this.

"That is marvellous for me," said the king: "go you to lie down again,
and if I notice it again I will go out myself."

When Conall and his sons perceived that the gillies were gone, they
laid hands again on the horse, and one of them caught him, and if the
noise that the horse made on the two former times was great, he made
more this time.

"Be this from me," said the king; "it must be that some one is
troubling my brown horse." He sounded the bell hastily, and when his
waiting-man came to him, he said to him to let the stable gillies know
that something was wrong with the horse. The gillies came, and the king
went with them. When Conall and his sons perceived the company coming
they went to the hiding holes.

The king was a wary man, and he saw where the horses were making a
noise.

"Be wary," said the king, "there are men within the stable, let us get
at them somehow."

The king followed the tracks of the men, and he found them. Every one
knew Conall, for he was a valued tenant of the king of Erin, and when
the king brought them up out of the holes he said, "Oh, Conall, is it
you that are here?"

"I am, O king, without question, and necessity made me come. I am under
thy pardon, and under thine honour, and under thy grace." He told how
it happened to him, and that he had to get the brown horse for the king
of Erin, or that his sons were to be put to death. "I knew that I
should not get him by asking, and I was going to steal him."

"Yes, Conall, it is well enough, but come in," said the king. He
desired his look-out men to set a watch on the sons of Conall, and to
give them meat. And a double watch was set that night on the sons of
Conall.

"Now, O Conall," said the king, "were you ever in a harder place than
to be seeing your lot of sons hanged tomorrow? But you set it to my
goodness and to my grace, and say that it was necessity brought it on
you, so I must not hang you. Tell me any case in which you were as hard
as this, and if you tell that, you shall get the soul of your youngest
son."

"I will tell a case as hard in which I was," said Conall. "I was once a
young lad, and my father had much land, and he had parks of year-old
cows, and one of them had just calved, and my father told me