All this amazing tale was blurted and stuttered out in gasps and spasms of speech, its hearer grasping at half words and interpreting much from little. Now when Simon had heard it, and it took but a few hot seconds in the telling, he saw one thing plain for him to do, which was to try to rescue the duchess, much as he hated her. Simon would willingly have left Bohemond behind, thinking him too pretty a stripling to be of grave use in a scuffle. But Bohemond would by no means be persuaded to stay, seeing which Simon liked his mettle and clapped him on the back. Then noting that the rogues had stolen the lad's sword, he lent him his great dagger. "For," said Simon, "if we find the fly-by-nights, you may busy yourself in putting out of their pain any that I chance to leave unfinished." Now as they started on their search, which did not prove a long one, as you shall hear, Bohemond, babbling at his companion very incoherently, for he was weeping himself sick for his wicked mistress, told all that had chanced in Athens after the slaughter in the marsh. How of Duke Baldwin's knights only two came off with their lives that were made prisoners by special charge of Fernand Ximenes, and these twain were Count Ernault of Toulouse and Sir Jaufre de Brabant. How the Catalan Grand Company, marching on the track of the scattered army, entered the city of Athens unopposed and unimpeded. How the estates of the slain knights were divided among the followers of Ximenes and their women distributed among the victors, so that many a sturdy Catalan mercenary received for wife some noble lady for whom the day before the battle he would have counted it an honor to carry a basin for her washing of the hands. How Ximenes compelled the archbishop of Athens to wed him in state to Esclaramonde, insisting that she was a widow, which was, indeed, the common belief. Simon already knew how, on the morning after her latest marriage, Esclaramonde had left the city to seek for Argathona in the forest with the intent to slay her. While Bohemond was moaning out his story Simon was using his eyes as well as his feet. Indeed, there was little difficulty for a keen campaigner in getting on the track of the duchess and her abductors. A scrap of silk clinging to a twig, and recognized by the page as being of the color of his lady's gown, first set them on a trail that thereafter proved easy to follow. Simon's keen glances could read the record of the journey in snapped branches and trampled grasses, even if his guesses had not been confirmed again and again by bits of silk and bits of lace and once a fallen pearl. So, going warily, Simon and Bohemond came by-and-by to the edge of a little hollow place in the thick of the trees, and there, looking down, saw that which would have made the boy cry aloud in rage but that Simon clapped his great hand over his loyal mouth and silenced him.