Noon came, and the dinner hour, but the knight came not to the banquet hall--evening fell, and there were no tidings; but, at nightfall, Eadwulf came in, pale, ghastly, and terrified, and announced that the knight and the esquire both lay dead with their horses in a glade of the wood, not far from the scene of the quarrel of the preceding day, on the banks of the river Idle. No time was lost. With torch and cresset, bow and spear, the household hurried, under their appointed officers, to the fatal spot, and soon found the tidings of the serf to be but too true. The knight and his horse lay together, as they had fallen, both stricken down at the same instant, in full career as it would seem, by a sudden and instantaneous death-stroke. The warrior, though prostrate, still sat the horse as if in life; he was not unhelmed; his shield was still about his neck; his lance was yet in the rest, the shaft unbroken, and the point unbloodied--the animal lay with its legs extended, as if it had been at full speed when the fatal stroke overtook it. A barbed cloth-yard arrow had been shot directly into its breast, piercing the heart through and through, by some one in full front of the animal; and a lance point had entered the throat of the rider, above the edge of the shield which hung about his neck, coming out between the shoulders behind, and inflicting a wound which must have been instantaneously mortal. Investigation of the ground showed that many horses had been concealed or ambushed in a neighboring dingle, within easy arrow-shot of the murdered baron; that two horsemen had encountered him in the glade, one of whom, he by whose lance he had fallen, had charged him in full career. It was evident to the men-at-arms, that Sir Philip's charger had been treacherously shot dead in full career, by an archer ambushed in the brake, at the very moment when he was encountering his enemy at the lance's point; and that, as the horse was in the act of falling, he had been bored through from above, before his own lance had touched the other rider. The esquire had been cut down and hacked with many wounds of axes and two-handed swords, one of his arms being completely severed from the trunk, and his skull cleft asunder by a ghastly blow. His horse's brains had been dashed out with a mace, probably after the slaughter of the rider; and that this part of the deed of horror had been accomplished by many armed men, dismounted, and not by the slayer of De Morville, was evident, from the number of mailed and booted footsteps deeply imprinted in the turf around the carcasses of the murdered men and butchered animals.