"Body o' God! an he had him a barb now, my lord of Stanley, whither, thinkest thou, would he be riding?" shouted someone out of the circle of mailed warriors that was exultingly closing in around the limp, misshapen figure huddled upon the ground. "Whither else but to the foul fiend!" returned Stanley, smiling grimly up into the speaker's face. "'Tis an easy riddle thou hast set me, a'Beckitt. But he'll need him no barb to fleet him his black soul into the burning lake, I'm thinking." "An Crookback sink not a treacherous dagger within the back of old Charon before he's ferried him across the Styx, I am wide of my guess," interrupted a third. "Or strike off and pole the three heads of Cerberus when he does get over," suggested another. "Look you yonder at the redoubtable Cheyney," again spoke Stanley, pointing toward a gigantic body, sprawled limply, face downward, over the top of a tangled clump of copsewood. "Him, good gentles, I saw totter and go down before this lump of bent clay like unto a lightning-riven oak. I' faith, much doth it marvel me at the furious strength that kept its abode within this crooked carcase." Upon an ebon-black stallion, and apart from the men hovering, vulturelike, above Richard's body, sat the Earl of Richmond, the fortunate young leader beneath whose lance the tyrant king had fallen. By reason of a natural eminence of heaped earth and stone he was raised well above the field, the whole of which he could command by a simple turning of his head to right and left. Behind him the deep shadows of Sutton Ambien Wood served picturesquely to emphasize the flash and glitter of the plated and richly inlaid armor that girded him from head to toe. It was then but a brief fortnight and a day since the ship in which he had embarked at Bretagne had brought him careening through Bristol Channel to a safe landing upon England's coast at Milford Haven. In that short time he had succeeded in setting a period to the devastating Wars of the Roses, and in exchanging his earl's coronet for that which fortune subsequently decided should be a crown. The lifeless body stretched before him in the hollow marked the pitiful end of nearly a century of deadly, internecine strife. Intently he watched them denuding the stiffening corpse of its costly armor and kingly vestments. During these moments that England was without a legal monarch, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, remained motionless as a statue upon his black steed, solitary, unheralded, forgotten. "Body o' God, men! we'll give him a horse," he heard them wildly shouting; and then impassively regarded them while they lashed the bent, and now naked body upon the broad back of a lively hackney. It was the final and brutal expression of a righteous indignation.