"There is no help for it," said the Emperor. "Do your best, and Heaven speed the shaft."
The bowman twanged the string, bending forward eagerly to watch the fate of his arrow. The shaft sang an ever lowering song, as it flew, falling fairly against the bars of the visor with an impact that rang back to them, palpably penetrating an interstice of the helmet, for it hung there in plain sight. The Count angrily shook his head, like an impatient horse tormented by the bite of a fly, but he sat steady, which showed the archer there was an arrow wasted. The toss of his head did not dislodge the missile, and the Count, with a sweep of his gauntlet, broke it away and cast it contemptuously from him.
"Alas!" groaned the archer, fitting the second to the string, "it was the thinnest bolt I had."
Count Bertrich waited not for the second, but came eagerly to meet it, bending down as a man does who faces a storm—levelling lance and striking spur. The horse gallantly responded. The second arrow struck the helmet and fell shivered, the third was aimed at the chain armour on the neck, and striking it, glanced into the wood, disappearing among the thick foliage. Still Bertrich came on unchecked, raising his head now to see through the apertures of his visor to the transfixing of the archer, who, well knowing there was but scant time for further experiment, hastily plucked a fourth arrow from his quiver, and, without taking aim, launched it with a wail of grief at the charger, driving the arrow up to its very wing in the horse's neck just above the steel breastplate. The horse, with a roar of terror, fell forward on its knees, its rider's lance thrusting point into the earth some distance ahead, whereupon Bertrich, like an acrobat vaulting on a pole, described an arc in the air and fell, with jangling clash of armour, at the feet of the Emperor, relaxing his limbs and lying there with a smothered moan.
The archer paid no attention to the fallen noble, but running forward to the horse began to bewail the necessity that had encompassed its destruction. He however thriftily pulled the arrow from its stiffening neck, wiped it on the grass, and spoke, as if to the dead horse, of the celerity of its end, and the generally satisfactory nature of bow-shot wounds, wishing that the animal might have had a realisation of its escape from being mauled to its death by clumsy Germans.
Rodolph stooped over his foe to throw back on its hinges his visor, whose opening revealed the unconscious face of the Count.
"It seems inhuman to leave him thus," he said, "but there is a woman's safety in question, and I fear he must take the chance he drove down upon."
"He can make no complaint of that," replied the archer, "and is like to come speedily to his contentious self again, if I may judge by the flutter of his eyelids. Indeed, I grieve not for his bruises, but for the hurt his obstinacy forced me to inflict upon his poor horse, a noble animal which I never would have slain did not necessity compel."
"Capture a horse belonging to one of the fallen men, and accompany me down the hill," said Rodolph, briefly.
The archer first recovered the two arrows that had overthrown his unknown opponents, bestowing on their bodies none of the sympathy he had lavished on the horse, for, as he muttered to himself, it was their trade, and a well-met shaft should occasion them little surprise, which undoubtedly was the fact.