By my side was the gold-hilted sword from Damascus which had been mine since the return of my father, Lord Mountjoy, from the Scottish war; and I bore no other arms nor thought of any need for them. My sixteenth birthday would not now be long in coming; and already my mark on the lintel post was within a handsbreadth of my father’s own. My voice had grown more settled of late; and, in the lonely reaches of the forest, I was practicing for my own delight a sweet ballad which I had often heard him sing, and which he had from the minstrels of Provence who had journeyed with the armies to the Holy Land. Suddenly, from the corner of my eye, I marked the movement of a bush in a little glade two hundred yards to the right of my path. The swing it made was none such as are caused by the wind; and indeed at the time all the air about was still and warm with the quietness of the summer of St. Martin’s. Rather was the movement I had scarcely seen the twitch of the leafy top of a sapling when its stem is roughly seized or when some heavy thing hath fallen against it. To me it told, plainly and well, that either was a deer grazing in that thicket or that some man, mayhap with good reason for not wishing to be seen, was hiding there. In a moment I had turned Clothilde’s head from the path and was riding through the light underbrush with my eyes fixed on the ferny glade. Soon I broke through the bushes that screened it and saw a youth in the Lincoln green of a forester, stripping the hide from a fine antlered buck. There had been, in the troublous times of the past year and more, while most of the knights and gentlemen of the countryside were with the King’s banner in Scotland, far too much of lawless slaying of deer by poaching villains and forest hiding thieves. Twice had I, in the thick of the woods, come on the half-flayed and mangled carcasses which had been left to waste or to feed the wolves after tenderloins and haunches had been cut away. Now my choler quickly rose within me, and I called out, full rough and loud: “How now! Thou deer-stealing varlet! I have thee red-handed. By my faith, thou shalt smart well for this.” The poacher sprang up and faced me; and I saw that he was a youth of not more than my own time, though perhaps a thought broader of the shoulders and hips. He seemed not like a forest lurker either, for he had a good and open English face with the wide blue eyes that low-hearted knaves but seldom have. Now, however, he answered my threatening looks with a stare as bold as that of Robin Hood, and flung back at me in snarling tones: “I steal no deer. I am the son of Elbert the forester of Pelham. My lord of Pelham allows us four good deer in each twelve-month; and this is but the third we have taken.”