The stranger took it with the utmost quietness, observing as though to himself that it was surprising there should still be places where a churl thought he had the right to choose when he was commanded; but while he was saying it he was stepping from the bushes. Now he drew his sword from its jewelled sheath.
The gleam which the steel sent through the glade was reflected in the forester’s face. He made cordial haste to pluck forth his hunting-knife.
Glancing from that short blade to his own long one, the courtman hesitated an instant; then he laughed softly at himself.
“It is no lie about Norse habits that they stick to one like iron in frosty weather!” he murmured. “Almost I was in danger of treating the matter as a combat between equals.”
Having escaped that danger, he wasted no more time on preliminaries, but delivered his first thrust. If his opponent had stood upon ceremony, he would have been disabled by a pierced right arm.
Luckily it was the school of emergency that had given the forester his training. Though a smothered word betokened surprise, his instant leap backward carried him lightly out of range, and yet not so far out of reach but that his knife was able to strike up the other’s point and take advantage of the opening to land a stroke upon the tasselled breast. A buckle turned the blade away, but the profanity of the contact could not be denied. The courtman lowered his weapon for the purpose of removing his gold-stitched gloves.
“I see now that I shall have to let off more of your hot blood than I thought,” he remarked as he tucked the gloves under his belt. “Since you will have it—”
Driving suddenly past the other’s guard, he drove his sword into the deerskin shoulder,—would have driven it through, indeed, if the bite of the knife into his wrist had not momentarily relaxed his grasp.
The forester recovered his balance coolly.
“It will then be a fair bargain if I let off some of your breath,” he returned, and straightway asserted the one advantage he had foreseen to offset the difference in blade-lengths by leading his adversary a round of gnarled roots and hidden hollows and tangles of creeping things.