GIVING THE REASON WHY THE SKRAELLINGS FLED
It happened, however, that Thorfinn Karlsefne did not get back from his
spring exploring trip in time for the games. Inspecting all the
self-sown wheat-fields and natural vineyards in the vicinity, he had
been gone a week; and the light of the momentous day had faded into
twilight and the dusk in its turn had melted into moonlight, silvering
the forest like a frost, before he came through it with his men.
Meeting a ray of light from the last booth in the line and catching from
the same source a faint note of revelry, he spoke smilingly to his
partner, Snorri of Iceland: "I recollect now that we have missed great
happenings. It is likely that if the light were good enough we should
find heads and limbs strewed like pebbles over the plain."
"What witches' stuff this moonlight is!" Snorri laughed in return. "As
you spoke, it almost seemed to me as if I saw an arm down there." He
nodded his head toward the ravine along whose brink they were walking;
and old Grimkel, behind him, followed the motion with his one eye and
grunted:
"I see what you mean,--yonder where the moon strikes. It has the look of
an arm."
Still moving forward, Karlsefne also glanced down into the black pool of
shadow. From the dark slope, something like a snag stood out so that the
moonlight caught it and gave it a weird resemblance to a human hand with
fingers wide-spread in the air. Looking down at it, he came slowly to a
standstill. Presently, while the chat behind him ceased in surprise, he
grasped a wiry bush on the brink and let himself over the edge until he
could touch with his staff the dark mass from which the snag stood out.
Using the staff like a pitchfork, he flung off the layers of sodden pine
branches heaped there and bent to look again. Then he saw that the
reason it looked like an arm was because an arm was what it was, lean
and brown, outflung from a stark body lying face downward in the brush.
Those waiting above heard his voice rise awfully from the shadow: "It is
a Skraelling who has been murdered! Fetch torches!"
Waiting for the lights to be brought, the men stood looking dumbly at
one another and at the snag-like arm, in every mind the same thought.
Once Karlsefne's deep tones interpreted their silence, tolling heavily
through the darkness:
"I do not know who has done this deed, but I know that in slaying this
one man he has taken the lives of more men than tongue can number. If
ever the Skraellings come again it will be to make warfare, and to save
our lives we shall be forced to take more of theirs; and so it will go
on through ages yet unborn, until a white face--which I had striven to
make a sign of friendliness--will become to the wild men a token of
bloodshed." A moment his voice rang out in terrible wrath: "Behold how
the heedlessness of one man can overthrow the wisdom of a hundred!"
Daring no answer, they awaited in silence the arrival of the torches.
But when at last the lights had been brought and handed down, and they
had descended after them, at least four spoke at once:
"It is the Skraelling who offered the bear's hide!"
"By Odin," cried a fifth, "I saw him walking in this direction shortly
before the time of the scream! He must have fallen over the bank and
lain all this while under the snow that was coming down."
"What has become of the hide, however?" pondered Hjalmar Thick-Skull,
before memory recalled to him whose booth the great skin was even now
gracing as its chiefest treasure.
"It must be that they bought it just before he was slain," Grimkel
struck in hastily.
But the Lawman took the torch from him and held it to each brown hand in
turn. "No ring with a red stone is on any of the fingers," he said.
Immediately after, Hjalmar, holding the other torch, uttered an
exclamation: "Here is what slew him!" and they all crowded forward to
look,--and looking, stood dumfounded.
The Thick-Skulled said wonderingly: "Now I have several times heard it
said that men believe Brand the Red gave the Skraelling a weapon for the
skin, but no man guessed that a weapon had been given in this way."