"Oh, the bodkin through my tongue! Oh, the bodkin through my tongue!"
Two of the guard sat with hanging lip and lacklustre eyes, turned to stone; one, at full length upon the ground, bruised his face against the pine needles and called on the Virgin; the fourth, panic-stricken, leaped to his feet and dashed off into the darkness, to trouble us no more that day.
"Oh, the heavy chains!" cried the unseen spectre. "Oh, the dead man in his grave!"
The man on his face dug his nails into the earth and howled; his fellows were too frightened for sound or motion. Diccon, a hardy rogue, with little fear of God or man, gave no sign of perturbation beyond a desperate tugging at the rope about his wrists. He was ever quick to take suggestion, and he had probably begun to question the nature of the ghost who was doing him such yeoman service.
"D' ye think they've had enough?" said Sparrow in my ear. "My invention flaggeth."
I nodded, too choked with laughter for speech, and drew my sword. The next moment we were upon the men like wolves upon the fold.
They made no resistance. Amazed and shaken as they were, we might have dispatched them with all ease, to join the dead whose lamentations yet rang in their ears; but we contented ourselves with disarming them and bidding them begone for their lives in the direction of the Pamunkey. They went like frightened deer, their one goal in life escape from the wood.
"Did you meet the Italian?"
I turned to find my wife at my side. The King's ward had a kingly spirit; she was not one that the dead or the living could daunt. To her, as to me, danger was a trumpet call to nerve heart and strengthen soul. She had been in peril of that which she most feared, but the light in her eye was not quenched, and the hand with which she touched mine, though cold, was steady.
"Is he dead?" she asked. "At court they called him the Black Death. They said"-"I did not kill him," I answered, "but I will if you desire it."
"And his master?" she demanded. "What have you done with his master?"
I told her. At the vision my words conjured up her strained nerves gave way, and she broke into laughter as cruel as it was sweet. Peal after peal rang through the haunted wood, and increased the eeriness of the place.
"The knot that I tied he will untie directly," I said. "If we would reach Jamestown first, we had best be going."