"I thank you for your greeting, but I came to claim no right, but to render the pledge I made. It has happened that Hallad saw me kill the Skraelling, in that time which I lost out of my mind." He could not bring himself to meet Karlsefne's eyes when he had finished, but turned away and laid a hand on Gard's shoulder and hid his face on his arm.
Above the hubbub that rose, two voices made themselves heard, Gudrid's crying distressfully: "I do not believe it!" and Hallad's wailing: "Why do you betray yourself?" Then the Lawman spoke in a tone that silenced them both:
"Let Hallad tell what he has seen."
It is but justice to Hallad to say that he would have refused if he had dared; and not daring, he mingled his recital with pleas for mercy. But the terrible evidence had to come out at last.
When the tale was finished and the teller had sunk down in tears upon Biorn's footstool, Alrek lifted a face that seemed pale because such black misery was in his brown eyes.
"I ask you only to believe that when I said I was innocent, I did not know that I was guilty."
After a while the Lawman bent his head. "I believe that," he granted. But he granted no more; and his closed mouth was like a line graven on stone.
It was as though the wind had brought a breath from a glacier through the warm summer day. No man's heart but felt the chill; and gradually the whispers, even the motions, ceased and the room was as still as a Greenland winter.
Slowly the Lawman rose and stood before his high-seat, an awe-full figure as the light fell coldly on the chiseled beauty of his face and the iron of his hair and his beard.
"I believe that you did not know your guilt," he said, "but I believe also that you acted out your true nature when you did the slaying. What Hallad says about the Huntsman's spell-power is child's talk. No spell was on your father when he committed such crimes, and none was on you when you attacked the Skraelling on the Cape of the Crosses. I think now what I have thought always,—that you struck this blow in the Berserk madness which is like poison in your blood; even as you struck on the Cape, even as you would strike again though the welfare of a thousand men should hang on your peacefulness. The cause of a hundred you have already defeated because I pardoned you once; I dare not risk sparing you again. You offered me your life. I take it. There is a gallows ready where a pine-tree stands by the Skraelling's mound. It is my command that Lodin and Asgrim and the men beside them, put you into fetters and take you forth and hang you there."