He leaped off his horse on to the squashy earth, and, though his great weight drew him deep over ankles into the loathsome slush, he was nearer to the edge of the terror than the main of the cavalry, and better able to move and act. With carnage raging ahead of him, Simon, as coolly as if he had been in a tent at a tournament, stripped most of the mail from the body of his unresisting lord, taking care to leave him his sword girded about his middle. Then, with a like composure and a like rapidity, he ripped the armor from his own limbs, and, picking up Rainouart from the slough where he lay senseless, flung him on to his shoulder as easily as he might have lifted a woman. Even in that moment, however, he showed his campaigning spirit. Knight or no knight, Simon had a fine appreciation for the merits of a ripe old wine, and, as fighting was ever hungry work, he had not thought it beneath his new dignity to make a filled wallet and a leather bottle of red wine part of his equipment. Now he snatched both from his saddle-bow and hooked them to his belt before beginning on his desperate enterprise of escape from the mouth of the pit. The mouth of the pit was like the mouth of hell. There were little lanes of oozy earth running in all directions behind him, green with trampled corn and red with Frankish blood. In front of him the bog he had crossed spluttered and gurgled, and across its treacherous surface he essayed, at all adventure, to reach some firmer soil. Up to this time Simon's doings had passed unchallenged. All around him the morning was made hideous by the screams of the dying and the shrieks of the triumphant Catalans as they drove home their pitiless knives, and knight after knight of those that had been the glories of Duke Baldwin's court went unprepared on the path to paradise. If any of the enemy noticed Simon at his work they may, seeing one man stripping the armor from another, have taken him heedlessly for one of themselves, who, having slain, was prompt to plunder. But now some five or six of the Catalan stabbing rabble, having worked ahead of their fellows, and seeing a man with another man on his shoulders wading through blood and mud towards the dry land, where the main strength of the Athenian army was still standing, came rapidly to head him off, running quickly and securely on the ridges familiar to them that divided the different fields of wheat and barley, or wading through the bog itself with ease in their nearly naked condition. They chose their prey unwisely, for Simon had his great sword bare in his hand, and, as the rascals came at him, Simon, wielding his terrible weapon, struck off head after head of his assailants till none were left to face him, and then made use of their bodies as convenient stepping-stones to help him a little farther to his desired haven, while such others as were tempted to join in the chase, seeing the havoc he wrought upon their comrades, turned with alacrity to less-resisting victims.