Gaillard’s eyes swept hillside and valley, for he was shrewd enough to guess that many an alert shadow had dogged them on the march that day. He dismounted, sent his archers into the woods as scouts, and taking the pick of his men-at-arms, marched up to the silent house, holding his shield ready to catch any treacherous arrow that might be shot from the dark squints. A wooden perch shadowed the main entry, and Gaillard saw that the door stood ajar, and that the flagstones paving the porch were littered with rushes, and caked with mud as though many feet had passed to and fro over the stones. Gaillard pushed the door open with the point of his sword. It gave to him innocently enough, and he crossed the threshold, and stood staring at something that the men behind him could not see. The place had the dimness of twilight, lit as it was by the narrow lancets cut in the thickness of the wall. Not three paces from Gaillard, their feet nearly touching the floor, two bodies dangled on ropes from the black beams of the roof. The face of the one was grey; of the other, black and turgid; for one had died by the sword, the other by the rope. The body with the black face was still twisting to and fro as a joint twists on a spit before the fire. The arms had been pinioned, and the man’s tongue been drawn out, and the head of an arrow thrust through it. The face could scarcely be recognised, but by the clothes Gaillard knew him for Dan Barnabo, the Italian, lutanist, lover, spoiler of the poor. Gaillard touched the body. It was still warm. His men were crowding in, peering over each other’s shoulders so that the doorway was full of faces, shields, and swords. Gaillard waved them back. He swung his sword, struck at the rope that held Barnabo, and cut it so cleanly that the body came down upon its feet. For a moment it stood, poised there, before falling forward to hide its black face in the rushes. Gaillard looked at it a little contemptuously, thinking of Etoile, and the rivalry between her and this thing that had been a man. “Only fools come by such a death,” he said. “A dog’s death. This man had a woman’s hands.” Dusk was falling, and Gaillard and his men settled themselves to pass the night in dead Barnabo’s house under the oak trees. Gaillard, who did not trouble himself about such a thing as a “crowner’s quest,” had the two bodies buried in the garden at the foot of a holly tree. Waleran de Monceaux had hanged Barnabo, and the priest was not pretty to look at with his black face and his swollen tongue. Nor was Gaillard going to quarrel with so convenient a coincidence. He called his archers back out of the woods, posted two sentinels, had the horses brought in and stabled in the hall. A fire was lit on the hearth, and the men gathered round it, and opened their wallets for supper.