As Constans paddled out into the stream he heard the steady thumping of oars in rowlock. He shoved back into the shadow of the pier just as a great galley filled with men came foaming down the river. Constans could see that it was a war-vessel of the largest size, for there were full sixty oars on a side arranged in two banks. The figure-head was the representation of a black swan, and on the poop-deck stood the slight, graceful figure of a man wearing a plumed hat. Constans saw him remove the cigar from his lips as he turned to give an order. Instantly the port-oars held and backed, and the galley, swinging round on her heel, headed up-stream again, passing within fifty yards of Constans's hiding-place. The boy's bow was in his hand, but he had not attempted to fit an arrow to the string. "It will come--the time," he said, under his breath. Constans stared gravely after the _Black Swan_ as she drove along. But for the best of good-fortune he might now be tugging at a heavy ashen oar, with the lash of the deck-master striping his back. Ulick, Esmay--yes, he had much to remember. Two hours later he had scaled the wall of Croye, without being discovered by the sleepy sentinels, and was safe on his pallet of corn-husks in Messer Hugolin's attic. X THE MESSAGE Three years had passed since that first memorable visit to Doom the Forbidden--years of work and of growth. The simple out-door life and the physical toil had been good discipline for Constans, and he was now a well-built young fellow of two-and-twenty, nearly six feet tall and with muscles like steel wire. The nights, too, had afforded compensation for the labors of the day, for then he could read and study. The two big volumes of the scientific cyclopaedia had been his school-masters, and he had striven faithfully to learn of them. What a wonderful lesson it had been, for while there was much in this teaching that he could not understand at all, there was much again that, with the aid of the illustrations and diagrams, he could make really his own. And so, little by little, he had been able to reconstruct, in imagination, at least, the lost civilization of the ancient world; how men had tamed the lightning and bade it speak their will and work their pleasure; how the same vapor that issued from the pot bubbling on Martina's fire could be harnessed and made to draw a hundred wagons at once upon the old-time steel-railed highways; how a child's hand on the crank of a machine-gun might hurl invisible death among a regiment of men and put even an army to flight. Steam and gunpowder and electricity, what wonderful ideas were connoted in the words! The very names thrilled him with a sense of infinite power.