Gaillard and his men broke through, hurling the brushwood aside, dragging it into the hall, cursing as they realised the devil’s trick that had been played them. Only the outer faggots were alight. There was a gush of flame under the hooded entry, but Gaillard and his men sprang through it with a weird glitter of gold upon their harness, and an uprush of smoke and sparks. Dark figures flitted about the priest’s garden. Arrows whistled and struck the walls as the Savoyard’s men came tumbling out over the burning faggots. There was a sharp tussle in the garden; blows were given and taken in the dark; arrows shot at a venture; torches thrust into hairy faces. Gaillard’s men-at-arms in their heavy mail, for they had lain down armed to sleep, were more than a match for the woodlanders in their leather jerkins. Soon—scampering shadows went away into the moonlight. Gaillard and his men were left to put out the fire about the porch. And savage men they were, men with the hot flare of that death trap in their nostrils. The two sentinels had been stalked and killed, and the brushwood piled against the door. The windows were so narrow that men could have been shot while struggling through them. The flames and smoke would have leapt in, making the place a hell of plunging, terrified beasts, and mad and half-dazed men. Gaillard watched his fellows trampling on the brushwood. Now and again an arrow came whistling out of the moonlight. “We will pay them for this,” he said grimly. “God, but they meant to burn us like blind mice in a stack!” The fire was soon out, and there was nothing left but to wait for the daylight, and to keep the house in darkness so that no lurking woodlander should have the outline of a window for a mark. Gaillard’s men were very sullen and bitter over the night’s adventure. They had brought in the two dead sentinels, and crowded about them, letting their fury break out in growls for to-morrow’s reckoning. There was no more sleep for Gaillard’s men that night; they squatted round the walls, telling each other what they would do to these people who murdered priests and set fire to houses where the King’s men slept. The dawn came with a thick mist hanging over the woods, even covering the crowns of the uplands of Bright Ling. Gaillard had made his plans, and in the garden the little spy was drawing a map on the soil with the point of a charred stake. The archers had gone out to scout, but had found nothing but fog and rotting bracken. Gaillard ordered his men to horse, and they were soon on the move through the mist, the drippings from the trees falling on them, and on grass that was grey with dew.