The man and boy beneath the tree crouched low. "Art afraid?" whispered the man. And the boy whispered back, "It is he that I hate, and all his kind." His child-heart beat violently against his side, great beads stood out upon his forehead, and his hands trembled. "If you but knew the sorrow in the villages! Aye, in the whole country--because of him! He takes the bread from the mouths of the pitiful poor--and we are all so poor! The women and babes starve, but the taxes must be paid. Upon the aged and the crippled, even, fall heavy burdens. And all because of him and his kind!" The man looked at the flushed face and trembling limbs of the boy, and his own face glowed in a golden smile that was full of a sudden and unaccustomed tenderness. "Why, see now," he whispered, "that is easily overcome. Look! I will show thee the way." Lifting himself cautiously, he crouched on all fours in the grass, slipping and sliding forward so hiddenly that the keen ear and eagle eye of the approaching soldier took note of no least ripple in the quiet grass by the roadside. It was the sinuous, silent motion of a snake; and suddenly his eyes narrowed, his lips drew back from his teeth, his ears pricked forward, along the ridge of his bare back the hair bristled, and the locks about his face waved and writhed as though they were the locks of Medusa herself. Ah, and were those the flanks and feet of a man, or of a beast, that bore him along so stealthily? The child watched him in a horror of fascination, rooted to the spot in terror. With the quickness of a flash it all happened--the martial traveller taken unaware, the broad-bladed sword wrenched from his hand by seemingly superhuman strength, a sudden hideous grip at his throat, blows rained upon his head, sharp sobbing breaths torn from his panting breast ... a red stain upon the dusty road ... a huddled figure ... silence. And he who had been a man indeed a few brief, bright years, was no more now than carrion; and he who through all his boasted aeons had not yet reached the stature of a man stood above the dead body, his face no longer menacing, but beautiful with a smiling delight in his deed. And then suddenly the spell that held the child was broken, and he leaped out upon the murderer and beat and beat and beat upon him with helpless, puny child-fists, and all a child's splendid and ineffectual rage. And at that the man turned and thrust the child from him in utter astonishment, and the boy fell heavily back upon the road, the second quiet figure lying there. And again the man's face changed, became vacant, bewildered, troubled; and stooping, he lifted the boy in his arms, and ran with him westward along the road, through the fields of dead-ripe wheat, across the stubble of the garnered barley, fleet-footed as a deer, till he could run no more.