"No, no, Monsieur Gaspard," he whispered, clinging to my sleeve as he had clung to Roland's bridle the day Solignac was burned. "Let them settle it among themselves; our way is by the window opposite. What have we to do with other men's brawls. Once in the courtyard and----" He stopped short and swung round on his heel. "_Dame_! there is the fellow who struck Ninus across the muzzle! With you, Monseigneur, with you! A Hellewyl! a Hellewyl! Only for heaven's sake, let the women stand back." And before I could follow his change of mood he had flung our candle into a corner and was leaning across the table side by side with him I have called Monsieur Narbonne. "We pay no debts in Paris, do we not?" he cried, jerking a knee on to the table with his left hand while he lunged with the right, "My faith! but we do, we of Flanders!" and his blade went home. It was first blood for us. From behind Villon was drawn back out of reach of the point at his throat, over went the table between us--Martin saving himself by a backward leap--and what happened thereafter I cannot tell. Twice I was hurt; once by a stone on the shoulder, and once by a stab instinctively parried in the dark by my left arm. But the putting out of the light saved us. Through the windows a straggle of moonbeams fell on the yelling, rascally mob, but left us in gloom. If they were outlines we were shadows, so like the fuller darkness as to be hardly visible, and the shadows had the advantage. Of two things the room seemed full; noise, the din of cursing voices, shuffling feet, groans, obscenities, and a faint play of light like the flight of dull fireflies as the moon caught the twisting flats of steel. Then the end came, but from without, not from within; a knocking at the inn door that grew louder and louder, and as it grew the babel within sobered. The kennel crew knew its meaning better than we. By ones and twos, and then in a swarm, the mob fled. François the First and Last, King of Song, and High Priest of all the rest of his blatancy, heard Montfauçon call for the fourth time, and had no heart to dance upon nothing to the music of that sinister voice. CHAPTER VII THE SHREWDEST BRAIN IN FRANCE By the provost's lantern we were able to count losses. Martin had a cut upon the forehead which, dribbling down by the corner of his mouth, gave him a pitiful appearance, but meant little. The thickness of his skull, he said, saved him. Monsieur Narbonne's companion had his own wounds to lament, and Mademoiselle's guard was cursing softly in a language I did not understand over a palm slashed in warding off a two-edged dagger. If it was French he spoke, it was no French that I had ever heard. Monseigneur was unhurt, and my own bruises were no worse than three or four days would see cured.