A bowstring twanged; the arrow sped to its mark--the fair young breast of Oxenford's daughter--and in her father's arms the maiden gasped and died; all this in the space of time in which a cloud of the bigness of a man's hand might pass across the sun. Down from the lower branches of that accursed oak dropped the lithe figure of a man garbed all in gray. "Stop him!" called a weak, uncertain voice, but no one moved. The man in gray waved his hand derisively and disappeared into the bush. An inarticulate sound arose from the closely packed throng in the enclosure, the exhalation of a universal sigh. Red Oxenford had made neither sound nor sign. He stood motionless, his daughter's head cradled in the hollow of his arm; he stared stupidly at the girl's face, so pitifully white and small it seemed, with its virginal coronal of flaxen hair--then he fell in a heap, like to a collapsing wall. Piers Major gently withdrew the bolt from the wound and held it up to view. Its message was plain to all, for none save the Doomsmen feathered their arrows with the plume of the gray goose. Only now the quills were stained to a darker hue. "It is her blood," he said, and the shaft of polished hickory snapped like a straw between his fingers. "Her blood! and of Doom shall we require it." And at that all the people shouted and then stood with uncovered heads, while the young men bore away the body of Oxenford's daughter on their locked shields and gave it to her mother. [Illustration: "OF DOOM SHALL WE REQUIRE IT"] That night Constans rode out from Deepdene at the head of twenty picked men, leading them to the secret place where he had stored the guns and ammunition which he had brought from Doom. Two days of practice with the unfamiliar weapons, and on the morning of the third the little squad, reinforced by a company of two hundred men-at-arms, set out upon the northern road. Towards noon they passed through Croye. It had been their intention to stop here for the mid-day meal, but none cared to propose a halt after entering this strange city of silence. Ordinarily the central square would have been filled with a voluble, chaffering crowd, it being a market-day; now there was not a living thing to be seen, not even a hog wallowing in the kennel nor a buzzard about the butcher-stalls. Yet there were no traces of fire and sword, the houses had suffered no violence, and stood there barred and shuttered as though it were still the middle watch of the night. "What think you?" said Piers Major to Constans. "Is it the plague?" "No, or there would be fires burning in the streets and yellow crosses chalked upon the door-lintels. Those who keep so close behind their bolts and bars are living people, hale and strong as ourselves. But, assuredly, some great fear has been put upon them. Perhaps we shall know more as we go on."