Oh, the crowding and shouting and trampling under foot in the ranks of our enemies! The threats and the fear and the curses! Our arrows kept pouring from the firing slits. A younger knight caught his chief by the shoulders while another seized his legs, and they bore him quickly away. There was no need for any order to retreat. The whole body was in headlong flight in the winking of an eye, pursued by the whizzing bolts and the jeering yells of our fellows in the towers. On the battlements above stood my lady mother, old Dame Franklin and I, holding aloft our flaming torches. Suddenly the old nurse screamed that I was hurt. And indeed, I now felt a most sharp pain through my shoulder where, it seems, had struck a bolt discharged by some Carleton archer. My doublet was covered with blood; and I felt a most unmanly giddiness. It was over in a flash; but my mother, pale as a ghost under the torchlight, had seized me by one arm while Dame Franklin grasped the other, fearing forsooth lest I fall from the battlements to the moat below. Between them, I made my way down to the hall where they led me to a couch, they all the while mumbling and weeping and forgetting our glorious victory which had all my thoughts. Soon old Marvin had drawn the arrow and dressed the hurt with the simples he had at hand. ’Twas my first wound, and, truth to tell, as Marvin plucked the bolt away my stomach was none too well at ease, and the room and all its folk swung slowly round and round. Yet when I heard him declare to my lady mother that the young master was now a man in his own right and a worthy son of the Mountjoys, I closed my eyes to the dizzying hall with its dancing armor suits and its nodding pictures of my long dead forbears, and soon slumbered, well content. For two hours and more I slept as one drugged. When my eyes opened, the hall had ceased its swinging, and my mother sat by my couch and did hold my hand in both of hers as she was wont to do long, long ago when I was but a child. Dame Franklin, in a chair near by did slumber deeply and with most comical groans and snores. Just then returned old Marvin, fresh from new labors in the moat. He and Alan had again cleared away all the contrivings of our enemies; and he was in high feather at our victory. “Lady Mountjoy,” he said, making due obeisance, “we have beaten the wolf-pack full soundly. The Old Wolf himself is sore stricken, if not dead; and the others will gladly crawl to their holes. Sir Dickon will have a merry tale and true to tell my lord when he comes from the Scottish war.” “Say’st thou so, good Marvin?” quoth my mother in reply. “Dost think we have smitten them so they will give over all their evil design?”