A ratchet on the roller which held the finished web kept it from slipping back and held the warp stretched firm at that end, and in some looms there was a ratchet on the other roller as well. But Cornelys Bat preferred weights at the far end of the warp. These allowed the warp to give a tiny bit at every blow of the batten and then drew it instantly taut, no matter how heavy the box was made. "This kindly giving," explained the weaver, "preventeth the breaking of the slender threads. No law may be kept too straitly and no thread drawn too strictly. That is a part of the craft." Cornelys may have been thinking of something more than weaving when he made that observation. The quiet tapissiers of Arras had caused an uproar in the Guild of London Weavers. A few cool heads advised the others to live and let live. The Flemings would be good English folk in time, and whatever they knew would help the craft in the future. But others, forgetting that they had refused to let their sons serve apprenticeship to Cornelys Bat when he came, railed at him for taking Flemings, Gascons, Florentines and even a vagabond from nobody knew where, into his employ. "We will have no black sheep in our fold," vociferated the leader of this faction, a keen-faced, tow-headed man of middle age. "These foreigners will ruin the craft." "Tut, tut," protested Martin Byram, "I have heard Master Cole of Reading say that thy grandfather, his 'prentice boy, was a Swabian, Simon. And he brought no craft to England." There was a laugh, for everybody knew that the superior skill of the Flemings was one main cause of their success in the market. Some of the weavers even had the insight to see that so far from taking work away from any English weaver, they were thus far doing work which would have gone abroad to find them if they had not been here, and the gold paid them was kept and spent in London markets. For all that, the feeling against the Flemings grew and spread, and might have broken out into open violence if they had not been working on the King's tapestries. Nobody felt like interfering with them until that job was done, for the King might ask questions, and not like the answers. How much of all this Cornelys Bat knew, no one could tell. Cimarron watched him, but the broad, thoughtful face was placid as usual. One day, however, the dark young apprentice was set upon in the street, where he had gone on an errand, by a crowd of other lads who nearly tore the clothes off his back. They had not reckoned on effectual fighting strength in this foreign youth, and they found that even a black sheep can be dangerous on occasion. The threats which they muttered set the boy's mountain-bred senses on the alert, and he went back to the master weaver with the information that as soon as the King's tapestries were finished the looms and their shelter would be burned over their heads. "I hid in the loft and heard," said Cimarron earnestly. "They are evil men here, master."