Now, with casques tight closed, Bull Bengough and Sir Richard were awaiting the signal to charge. There was a sinking of many-colored scarves beneath a sea of staring, tense-drawn faces. A profound silence settled over all the field. They shot away together at the first note of the trumpeted signal. From the start Sir Richard couched his lance at Bull Bengough's helmet. As well might he have attempted to overthrow one of the Pyramids of Egypt, as to have essayed the upsetting of his burly antagonist through engaging the center of his impregnable shield. On account of the young knight's lesser weight, and the superior nimbleness of his horse's hoofs, he met Bengough a yard or more beyond the center of the lists and well within his own territory. The extreme bulk of his great body rendered the impact of Bengough's treelike lance against Sir Richard's shield like a collision with a mountain avalanche. The young knight felt himself shaken to the very backbone. If the wood had held, it might have been that Bengough would have sustained his wide reputation by sweeping his antagonist off his seat. Luckily for the young knight, however, it shattered to the grasp, and, with speed but slightly diminished, Sir Richard rode on through, with his lance's head wedged fast between the eye-slits of his adversary's helm. After that it was like sliding a filled hogshead backward off of a moving platform. Sir Richard fancied that he was sensible of a trembling of the earth when Bull Bengough alighted upon it. Thereupon, amid the loud huzzas of the spectators, the young knight rode to the front of his pavilion and commanded his squire to bring him the red-striped lance. Tyrrell, his next opponent, was riding slowly northward to take his place there at the end of the lists. Compared with his meeting with Bengough, Sir Richard's contact with the knight in black was almost featherlike in its softness. Their lances, couched well and true, both shattered to their grasps. It became now the young knight's turn to take the northern stand for the next course. He looked southward toward the open gate. It was choked with humanity, swaying this way and that in wide, serpentine curves. The task of clearing an open space there had already begun. Upon the sound of the trumpet's blast they made for the meeting place in the lists. But the knight in black was not for a moment in Sir Richard's eye. He saw but the gate, and within it the crowd of densely packed peasantry. Beyond opened out a wide sweep of sloping downs, of free roadways, and welcome forest glades. He had a fleeting picture as he flashed beneath the arched gateway of a line of determined, stern-faced, brawny men pushing and thrusting as though their very lives depended upon it. They contrived to clear him the narrowest of avenues, which closed together when he had passed through like the waters of a riven sea.