"Is it so?" said Cnut, while exclamations of surprise, but not of
apprehension, broke from those standing round. "If that be so, lad, you
have done us good service indeed. With fair warning we can slip through
the fingers of ten times 500 men, but if they came upon us unawares, and
hemmed us in it would fare but badly with us, though we should, I doubt
not give a good account of them before their battle-axes and maces ended
the strife. Have you any idea by which road they will enter the forest,
or what are their intentions?"

"I know not," Cuthbert said; "all that I gathered was that the earl
intended to sweep the forest, and to put an end to the breaches of the
laws, not to say of the rough treatment that his foresters have met with
at your hands. You had best, methinks, be off before Sir Walter and his
heavily-armed men are here. The forest, large as it is, will scarce hold
you both, and methinks you had best shift your quarters to Langholm Chase
until the storm has passed."

"To Langholm be it, then," said Cnut, "though I love not the place. Sir
John of Wortham is a worse neighbour by far than the earl. Against the
latter we bear no malice, he is a good knight and a fair lord; and could
he free himself of the Norman notions that the birds of the air, and the
beasts of the field, and the fishes of the water, all belong to Normans,
and that we Saxons have no share in them, I should have no quarrel with
him. He grinds not his neighbours, he is content with a fair tithe of the
produce, and as between man and man is a fair judge without favour. The
baron is a fiend incarnate; did he not fear that he would lose by so
doing, he would gladly cut the throats, or burn, or drown, or hang every
Saxon within twenty miles of his hold. He is a disgrace to his order, and
some day when our band gathers a little stronger, we will burn his nest
about his ears."