"Hastain the pirate Chief, Well with the offer pleased, Answered agreeably, 'Lo, I am willing!' Thus was the bargain struck, Thus he became the Count Of the vast Chartres land, He, once a swine-herd!" "By the devil and his horns! Long live Hastain! All is possible!" cried Simon Large-Ears, saying which he joined his piercing voice to the deep voices of the pirates, who, striking with their oars upon the row of bucklers that hung from the sides of the _holker_, sang fit to rend the welkin: "Thus was the bargain struck, Thus he became the Count Of the vast Chartres land, He, once a swine-herd!" "And now," Gaëlo resumed after his champions had finished the martial refrain, "if a swine-herd serf could become the master of a province, do you hold it impossible for fifteen resolute champions to take possession of the abbey of St. Denis, the richest abbey of all Gaul?" "No! No!" cried the pirates fired with the prospect of pillage, and again smiting with their oars the bucklers that hung from the sides of the _holker_. "To St. Denis! To St. Denis! Death to its tonsured masters! Pillage! Pillage! Fire and blood!" The thundering voice of Lodbrog the Giant dominated the din that proceeded from the Northmans' throats and the clangor of the smitten shields. Standing on his bench and whirling in one hand his long oar with the ease that he would have handled a reed, he bellowed at the top of his voice: "To St. Denis! To St. Denis!" And intoxicating and lashing himself into a fury with his own clamor, his savage features speedily betokened a degree of exaltation that developed into a kind of delirium. His eyes rolled rapidly in their orbits; his lips whitened with foam; and finally, emitting a terrible cry, he bent his oar in his hands and broke it in two as if it had been a cane. At the sight of such a display of superhuman strength, the Northmans, who had for some little while before been observing Lodbrog with anxious looks, now cried out in chorus: "Beware all! He is berserk! He will kill us all!" And before Gaëlo had time to prevent it, all the pirates threw themselves upon the giant, and by their united efforts rolled him overboard into the Seine.