'We'll fit him! We'll teach him to take the cross at other men's
expense!' shouted the followers, seizing on the boy.

'Nay; we'll bestow his cross on him for a free gift!' exclaimed
Roger de Maisonforte.

And Bertram, struggling desperately in vain among the band of
ruffians, found his left arm bared, and two long and painful
slashes, in the form of the Crusader's cross, inflicted, amid loud
laughter, as the blood sprang forth.

'There, Sir Crusader,' said Roger, grinding his teeth over him. 'Go
on thy way now--as a horse-boy, if so please thee, and know better
than to throw thy mean false English pretension in the face of a
gentle Norman.'

Men, horses, dogs, all seemed to trample and scoff at Bertram as he
fell back on the elastic stems of the heath and gorse, whose
prickles seemed to renew the insults by scratching his face. When
the King's horn, the calls, the brutal laughter, and the baying of
the dogs had begun to die away in the distance, he gathered himself
together, sat up, and tried to find some means of stanching the
blood. Not only was the wound in a place hard to reach, but it had
been ploughed with the point of a boar-spear, and was grievously
torn. He could do nothing with it, and, as he perceived, he had
further been robbed of his sword, his last possession, his father's
sword.

The large tears of mingled rage, grief, and pain might well spring