The Viking's Skull

by John R. Carling

'Shrieks like mandrakes torn from the ground!'

but I never thought to hear them in my own person."

He toyed idly with the spade, desirous, yet almost afraid, of making a second stroke.

In all his life Godfrey had never been so much alarmed as he was at that moment.

"Idris, let us leave this business—at least, for to-night."

His words acted as a stimulus to the other's courage.

"Leave it? Never! till I have forced my way to the heart of this hillock, and wrested the secret from it. On the very point of discovery must we turn back, frightened by a sound, the cry, probably, of some night-bird? We are not the first to break into a Norse barrow at midnight. Shall we be outdone in enterprise by others? No: though the dead Viking rise up, sword in hand, to repel me, yet will I go on."

And with this Idris lifted the spade, and attacked the side of the hillock, savagely cutting the mandrake root to fragments, half expecting to hear the weird cry again. But the sound, whatever its origin, was not repeated.

Finding the earth to be hard conglomerate, and not easily susceptible to impressions from the spade, Idris laid that tool aside, and, fitting the wooden shaft of a pickaxe into its iron head, proceeded to reduce the conglomerate to a crumble, which he then tossed aside with the spade, labouring alternately with the two implements.