revealed the foul floor and the rotting acorns, and in the far corner, on a
bed of withered boughs, something dark which might be a man. They stood
still and listened. There was the sound of painful breathing, and then the
gasp with which a sick man wakens. A figure disengaged itself from the
shadows. Seeing it was but one man, the four pushed inside, and the last
pulled the door to behind him.

"What have we here?" the leader cried. A man had dragged himself to his
feet, a short, square fellow who held himself erect with a grip on a
side-post. His eyes were vacant, dazzled by the light and also by pain. He
seemed to have had hard usage that day, for his shaggy locks were matted
with blood from a sword-cut above his forehead, one arm hung limp, and his
tunic was torn and gashed. He had no weapons but a knife which he held
blade upwards in the hollow of his big hand.

The four who confronted him were as ill-looking a quartet as Duke William's
motley host could show. One, the leader, was an unfrocked priest of Rouen;
one was a hedge-robber from the western marches who had followed Alan of
Brittany; a third had the olive cheeks and the long nose of the south; and
the fourth was a heavy German from beyond the Rhine. They were the kites
that batten on the offal of war, and the great battle on the seashore
having been won by better men, were creeping into the conquered land for
the firstfruits of its plunder.

An English porker," cried the leader. "We will have the tusks off him."
Indeed, in the wild light the wounded man, with his flat face and forked
beard, had the look of a boar cornered by hounds.

"'Ware his teeth," said the one they called Gil. "He has a knife in his
trotter."