"Die!" cried Karadeucq with a triumphant air. "The stock of the Terrible Eagle will no longer pursue the stock of Joel!"
"You lie, Gallic dog! My stock is not extinct. I have a son of my second wife at Soissons—and my present wife, Godegisele, is with child. My stock will live!"
And with a feeble voice, the dying man added:
"Hermit laborer, give me paradise—my good Bishop Cautin, have pity upon me! Oh, I am going to hell! to hell! the demons!"
And Neroweg expired, his face contracted in diabolical terror.
Missing the count, his leudes must have concluded that he lay buried under the smoldering ruins; some feared that the revolted slaves captured and took him with them. If they searched for him, they must have found the count's body at the outskirts of the forest, with his skull cleaved in twain by an axe blow, and stretched out at the foot of a tree, with the outward bark ripped off and on the bare trunk of which the following words were engraved with the point of a dagger:
"Karadeucq, the Vagre, a descendant of the Gaul Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak, killed this Frankish count, a descendant of Neroweg, the Terrible Eagle. Long live Gaul."