cried to them to forbear, for we were
friends, but they did not heed them, and passed, to reach the shore
below us as they might. We did not watch them.

For now the Irish had borne down the defence amidships, where the
run of the gunwales was lowest. The sheer weight of them as they
clambered, one over the other, on board, listed the ship over, and
made the boarding easier for those who followed. The wild Danish
war shout rose once or twice, and then it was drowned by the Irish
yell. After that there was a sudden silence, for the fighting was
over.

Then the victors leapt out of the ship and went ashore as swiftly
as they had come, and the forest hid them. The ship was hard and
fast aground now, and we pulled up abreast of her slowly, having no
mind to share her fate. Whether the Irish took any of her crew with
them as captives I do not know, but I saw her decks, and it seemed
hardly possible. So terrible a sight were they, that I feared lest
Gerda should in any way see it. But the doors of the cabin had been
shut, doubtless lest the fighting should fray the ladies.

"Will you venture farther, King Hakon?" asked the pilot.

"We will take one ship farther," he said. "The other shall bide
here, and see that this ship is not burnt by these wild folk.
Mayhap we shall want her."

Thoralf laughed at that. "We have no men to man her withal," he
said.

"We have men to sail her to Norway, and there wait the men to fight
for us," Hakon answered gaily. "We shall meet no foes on the high
seas, and we have met a queen whose men will hail us as their best
friends."

Thoralf shrugged his shoulders and laughed. "None can say that you
fare forward sadly, Hakon."

"This is the worse of the two ships," Bertric said. "The other is
Heidrek's own. He is not here. Asbiorn yonder commanded this."

"Asbiorn is in luck today," Earl Osric said, nodding toward those
terrible decks.

But Asbiorn stood on the foredeck with his back to that which he
had looked on, biting the ends of his long moustache, and pale with
rage. I did not wonder thereat.

Now Osric hailed the other ship and bade her anchor in the stream
while we went on. The pilot said that we could safely do so, and
that the next reach was the one of which he had spoken as a trap.
Then his comrade went into the bows with a long pole, sounding, and
so we crept past the stranded vessel, and into the most lovely
reach of river I had ever seen. It was well nigh a lake, long an