The slave had scarcely gone when the Duke drew back the linen curtain
whose folds fell to the ground behind him, shutting off the rear of the
tent, used as a sleeping-room.

A man with long gray hair, scarcely younger than Hariowald, came
forward glancing cautiously around him.

"We are alone, Ebarvin. Repeat your King's words exactly again. For
consider, you must repeat them to his face, on oath, before the
assembly of the people, if he deny them."

"He will not deny them," said the graybeard sorrowfully. "He is too
proud to submit to you, but he is also too proud to lie."

"It is a pity," replied the Duke, curtly. "He was a fearless man."

"You speak as if he were numbered with the dead!" cried the other,
shuddering.

"I do not see how he can survive. Or, do you believe he will change his
choice?"

Ebarvin silently shook his head.

"How long have you borne his shield?"

"Ever since he _had_ a shield. I carried his father's, too," sighed the
man.

"I know it, Ebarvin. And," he asked craftily, as if in reproach, while
his gray eye blazed with a searching light, "and yet you betrayed him?"

The man gripped his short sword angrily.

"Betray? I accuse him openly, after I have often warned him loyally,
after threatening that I would tell you all. He laughed at it; he would
not believe me."

"And why do you do it? You have loved him."

"Why? And you ask that--you, who taught it to me, to us all? True, it
was not you alone--first necessity! Why? Because only this league of
the Alemanni can save us from ruin, from the shame of bondage. Why? Oh,
Duke, the oaths with which you bound us years ago, before the ash of
Odin, are terrible. Ebarvin will not forswear himself; I will not, a
perjured man, drift through endless nights down the horrible river of
Hel among corpses, serpents, and swords. And I have learned through a
long life that we must stand together, or the Romans will destroy us
province by province. Oh, I would slay my own son if, disobedient to
the Duke and the Council of the people, he tried to burst our league
asunder."

Up sprang the old chieftain; his eye flashed with delight. Raising the
spear aloft with his left hand, he struck the right one on the
clansman's shoulder: "I thank you for those words, Ebarvin! And I thank
thee, thou Mighty One in the clouds! If such a spirit lives in the
Alemanni, the league will never be sundered."

CHAPTER XXII.

It was reall