“That we are,” and “Long live Norman of Torn,” and “Here’s to the chief of the Torns” signified the ready assent of the burly cut-throats. “Then swear it as ye kiss the hilt of my sword and this token,” pursued Norman of Torn catching up a crucifix from the priest’s table. With these formalities was born the Clan Torn, which grew in a few years to number a thousand men, and which defied a king’s army and helped to make Simon de Montfort virtual ruler of England. Almost immediately commenced that series of outlaw acts upon neighboring barons, and chance members of the gentry who happened to be caught in the open by the outlaws, that filled the coffers of Norman of Torn with many pieces of gold and silver, and placed a price upon his head ere he had scarce turned eighteen. That he had no fear of or desire to avoid responsibility for his acts, he grimly evidenced by marking with a dagger’s point upon the foreheads of those who fell before his own sword the initials NT. As his following and wealth increased, he rebuilt and enlarged the grim Castle of Torn, and again dammed the little stream which had furnished the moat with water in bygone days. Through all the length and breadth of the country that witnessed his activities, his very name was worshipped by poor and lowly and oppressed. The money he took from the King’s tax gatherers, he returned to the miserable peasants of the district, and once when Henry III sent a little expedition against him, he surrounded and captured the entire force, and, stripping them, gave their clothing to the poor, and escorted them, naked, back to the very gates of London. By the time he was twenty, Norman the Devil, as the King himself had dubbed him, was known by reputation throughout all England, though no man had seen his face and lived other than his friends and followers. He had become a power to reckon with in the fast culminating quarrel between King Henry and his foreign favorites on one side, and the Saxon and Norman barons on the other. Neither side knew which way his power might be turned, for Norman of Torn had preyed almost equally upon royalist and insurgent. Personally, he had decided to join neither party, but to take advantage of the turmoil of the times to prey without partiality upon both. As Norman of Torn approached his grim castle home with his five filthy, ragged cut-throats on the day of his first meeting with them, the old man of Torn stood watching the little party from one of the small towers of the barbican. Halting beneath this outer gate, the youth winded the horn which hung at his side in mimicry of the custom of the times. “What ho, without there!” challenged the old man entering grimly into the spirit of the play. “’Tis Sir Norman of Torn,” spoke up Red Shandy, “with his great host of noble knights and men-at-arms and squires and lackeys and sumpter beasts. Open in the name of the good right arm of Sir Norman of Torn.”