At the sight of the man who leaned against its flaming red cushions of eiderdown, Alwin forgot his admiration. The chief's eyebrows made a bushy line across his nose. The young bowerman knew, without words, why he had been sent for. He stopped where he was, a pace within the door, angry and embarrassed.
After a while, Leif said sternly: "You are very silent now, but it appears to me that I heard your voice loud enough in the hall last night."
"It was only that I was accusing Thorhall of a trick that he tried to put upon me. He allowed me to go up to the loft above the provision house without telling me that the flooring had been taken up, so that they might pour the new mead into the vat in the room below. In one more step I should have fallen through the opening and been drowned. It is plain he did it to avenge Kark. I should have burst if I had not told him so."
"I have commanded that my men shall not hold speech with the men of Eric except on friendly matters; that they shall avoid a quarrel as they would avoid death."
His tone of quiet authority had begun to have its usual effect upon his young follower; Alwin's head had bent before him. But suddenly he looked up with a daring flash.
"Then I have not been disobedient to you, lord; for I would not avoid death if it seemed to me that such shirking were cowardly."
A moment the retort brought a grim smile to Leif's lips; then suddenly his face froze into a look of terrible anger. He half started from his chair.
"Do you dare tell me to my face that, because I order you to keep the peace, I am a coward?"
Alwin gave a great gasp. "Lord, there is no man in the world who would dare speak such words to you. I but meant that I cannot bear such treatment as Thorhall's in silence."
Had another said this, the answer might have been swift and fierce; but Leif's manner toward this follower was always different from his way with others,—whether out of respect for his accomplishment, or a fancy for him, or because he discerned in him some refinement that was rare in that brutal age. The anger faded from his face and he said quietly: "Can you not bear so small a thing as that, for so great a cause as the spreading of your faith?"