slender lad, dark and keen of face, who might from his looks have been
either French or Italian. In reality he was a Milanese, Giovanni
Bergamotto, the only survivor of one of the families driven out of Milan
when Barbarossa took the city. He had lived nearly half his life in France
and in England, and spoke several languages nearly or quite as well as his
own.

The other was a big-shouldered, sullen-looking fellow with black eyes and
hair and a skin originally brown and now still darker from his out-of-door
life--a Pyrenean mountaineer known as Cimarron. It was doubtful if he
himself knew what his name originally had been; to all who knew him now he
was Cimarron, the mountain sheep,--strong, sure-footed, and silent, and
not half as stupid as people often thought.

The two had been in Brittany, in Paris, in Sicily and in Castile during
the past months, and in each country they had made their way directly to
the place in which the ruler happened to be holding court. At court they
had exhibited the marionette show now packed away in the donkey's saddle-
bags, once, twice or thrice as the case might be, until Giovanni had
succeeded in gaining audience with the wife of the ruler. He carried
pedlar's goods of very choice varieties, which might well appeal to ladies
of the court in those days of slow transportation and few shops.

Now the King of England had three daughters, each of them being married to
some prince of importance on the Continent of Europe, and he had adopted
this means of sending certain letters to be given into their hands. The
letter was carried inside a marionette, the head of the little carved
wooden figure being so made as to unscrew and reveal a deep narrow hole in
the body. The last of the three was Matilda, wife of Henry the Lion Duke
of Saxony, the most powerful vassal of Frederick Barbarossa; and