lay, a little,
limp bedraggled figure, in the mud of the road.

There they found her. The little, grim, gray man did not even dismount,
so indifferent was he to her fate; dead or in the hands of Peter of
Colfax, it was all the same to him. In either event, his purpose would
be accomplished, and Bertrade de Montfort would no longer lure Norman of
Torn from the path he had laid out for him.

That such an eventuality threatened, he knew from one Spizo the
Spaniard, the single traitor in the service of Norman of Torn, whose
mean aid the little grim, gray man had purchased since many months to
spy upon the comings and goings of the great outlaw.

The men of Peter of Colfax gathered up the lifeless form of Bertrade de
Montfort and placed it across the saddle before one of their number.

"Come," said the man called Guy, "if there be life left in her, we must
hasten to Sir Peter before it be extinct."

"I leave ye here," said the little old man. "My part of the business is
done."

And so he sat watching them until they had disappeared in the forest
toward the castle of Colfax.

Then he rode back to the scene of the encounter where lay the five
knights of Sir John de Stutevill. Three were already dead, the other
two, sorely but not mortally wounded, lay groaning by the roadside.

The little grim, gray man dismounted as he came abreast of them and,
with his long sword, silently finished the two wounded men. Then,
drawing his dagger, he made a mark upon the dead foreheads of each of
the five, and mounting, rode rapidly toward Torn.

"And if one fact be not enough," he muttered, "that mark upon the dead
will quite effectually stop further intercourse between the houses of
Torn and Leicester."

Henry de Montfort, son of Simon, rode fast and furious at the head of a
dozen of his father's knights on the road to Stutevill.

Bertrade de Montfort was so long overdue that the Earl and Princess
Eleanor, his wife, filled with grave apprehensions, had posted their
oldest son off to the castle of John de Stutevill to fetch her home.

With the wind and rain at their backs, the little party rode rapidly
along the muddy road, until late in the afternoon they came upon a white
palfrey standing huddled beneath a great oak, his arched back toward the
driving storm.

"By God," cried De Montfort, "tis my sister's own Abdul. There be
something wrong here indeed." But a rapid search of the vicinity, and
loud calls brought no further evi