“Tut, tut! Our sweet comrade is still wroth with us, John. Women are unreasonable.” Falconer growled at him. “Let the wench be! We have flayed her pride, and she hates us.” A squire, very hot and dusty, came cantering down on them. “News, sir—news!” “Out with it.” “My Lord of Troy is still camped on Bracknell Plain. They have not stirred, sir. Their horses are unharnessed, their sentries pushed out no farther than a furlong.” “Ye gods! This Roger Bland was never a soldier. Why, we shall be on them before they can get to horse. Come, sirs, come.” Away in the woods Martin Valliant was seeing strange things. He had followed the march of Sir Gregory’s men from Woodmere, and when they had reached the rolling heaths that led up to Bracknell Plain, he had drawn away among the pine thickets so that he could watch them without being seen. His course had led him toward one of those strips of woodland that jutted out into the plain toward my Lord of Troy’s camp, an open wood of beeches and Scots firs. The place seemed silent and empty, full of deep shadows and splashes of sunlight that played on the bracken and the trunks of the trees. Then of a sudden he saw something that made him drop down in the bracken like a bird when a hawk is hovering overhead. A knight in armor was riding his horse through the wood. He reined in and remained motionless, spear on thigh, red plume trailing under the branches. He wore a red tabard embroidered with gold; his horse’s harness was of red leather studded with brass; his spear was painted black, and a bunch of white roses had been tied to its throat. Martin, lying flat on his belly, grew aware of a strange, tremulous stirring in the deeps of the wood. It was as though some great monster were moving, ponderous and slow, the earth and the trees quivering as it moved. There was a shrilling of steel and the snorting of horses. The knight in the red tabard held up his spear, and the wood seemed to grow silent. Martin had blundered into the midst of a mystery. He crawled backwards through the bracken, keeping his eyes on the knight in the red tabard; but that gentleman was staring through a woodland window out upon Bracknell Plain, and Martin Valliant escaped unseen. He lay for a while in a little dell, resting his chin on his hands, and staring at the seed pods of the wild hyacinths that had carpeted the ground. The wood remained silent, save for the screaming of a couple of jays, yet Martin guessed that the red knight was no solitary adventurer, but the leader of a great company that was lying hidden among the trees.