The two Masters, I say, he of the Temple and he of the Hospital, had received Raymond’s order--to keep quiet within walls. This is the way they treated it. They sent at once to such knights of their two societies as were within riding distance of the town. They gathered less than one hundred. They harangued them in the market-place of Nazareth, saying it was foul shame to stand unmounted and with the sword sheathed while the Saracens rode unchallenged through the open country, with their high minaret cries of insult and defiance. The little group of knights was moved; for the whole spirit of their foundation was to risk odds and to sacrifice themselves perpetually. They cared nothing for numbers. With their footmen to serve them, perhaps four hundred (and these seem to have straggled and to have been left behind), they rode out before evening from the northern gate of Nazareth, and so eastwards, following the retirement of Afdal. Hence it was that Saladin’s son had seen them, as I have described, suddenly appearing upon the fall of the hill above them, a handful of armed men upon their larger horses, confronting a force more than a hundred times their own. The Templars and the Hospitallers charged. They were surrounded; nearly all fell; but in the course of the _mêlée_ the execution they did was so great that the day remained legendary with the enemy. One especially, James (who came from Maille, in Touraine, and who was among the last survivors), they thought (did the Saracens) to be St. George himself upon a white horse; for in both armies there was this superstition or vision as old as the battle of Konieh, that St. George was to be seen leading the Christian ranks. His enemies stood round the dead man with lifted hands, the dread of unseen things upon them. They wiped the sweat and blood and dust from his face, and carried him off like a relic, still thinking him something from beyond this world. When the slaughter was done, and all save, perhaps, some five or six of that little band had fallen (some cut their way out, we know, for we find them in the later battle), Afdal stuck Christian heads on his lances in triumph and rode on, and, with his reduced thousands, crossed Jordan just before the setting of the sun; and such was the end of that day’s foray. When the news of it came to Tiberias to Count Raymond, he saw at once the enormity of the moment. In numbers insignificant, their action should be forgiven as heroic; but the separate policy, the contempt for his orders, the provocation offered by these few knights, would surely set in movement that great machine, the rumbling of whose wheels all the East was expecting. It was a challenge to Saladin, the very challenge which Saladin thirsted for: and Raymond sweated to delay catastrophe. The challenge had been given prematurely in spite of him, and to the ruin of his plans. It could not now be undone.