Snatching up her slackened rein with one hand, his rider managed to secure her
leaping cap with the other; and after the first bounce, she caught the jerky
gait instinctively and swayed her body into its uneven swing. But her heart
was all at once a-throb in a wild panic. Was this what a boy must expect? This
challenging brutal downrightness, which made one seem to have become a dog
that must prove his usefulness or be kicked aside? Her spirit felt as bruised
as a fledgeling fallen upon stony ground. She shivered as the old beech stock
loomed up before her.

"If these other men behave so, it is in my mind to tell them that I am a
woman," she decided. "Since they are my own people, no evil can come of their
knowing; and I dislike the other feeling."

The recollection that she had always this escape open gave her a new lease of
boldness. Her courage rose as fast as her body when they began to climb the
hillside toward the ruddy light that slanted down between the tree-trunks.
When a sentinel stopped her near the top, she faced him with a fairly firm
front.

"I have war news for King Canute," she told him haughtily; and he let her pass
with no more than a grin.

The camp appeared to be strung through the whole beech grove that covered the
crest of the hill. The first sign of it began less than ten yards beyond the
sentry, where a couple of squatting thralls were skinning a slain deer; and as
far as eye could swim in the flood of sunset light, the green aisles were
dotted with scattered groups. Every flat rock had a ring of dice-throwers
bending over it; every fallen trunk its row of idlers. Wherever a cluster of
boulders made a passable smithy, crowds of sweating giants plied hammer and
sharpening-stone. The edges of the little stream that trickled down to the