The prisoner answered: “I do; I am Hans of Iceland.”
“You hear, Bishop?”
The little man shouted in the same breath with the president: “You lie, mountaineer of Kiölen! you lie! Do not persist in bearing a name which must crush you; remember that it has been fatal to you already.”
“I am Hans from Klipstadur, in Iceland,” repeated the giant, his eye riveted on the private secretary.
The small man approached the Munkholm soldier, who, like the rest of the audience, had watched this scene with eager curiosity.
“Mountaineer of Kiölen,” he cried, “they say that Hans of Iceland drinks human blood. If you be he, drink. Here it is.”
And scarcely were the words out of his mouth, when, tossing his sealskin mantle over his shoulder, he plunged a dagger into the soldier’s heart, and flung his dead body at the giant’s feet.
A cry of fright and horror followed; the soldiers guarding the giant started back. The small man, swift as lightning, rushed upon the defenceless mountaineer, and with another blow of his dagger, laid him upon the first corpse. Then flinging off his cloak, his false hair, and black beard, he revealed his wiry limbs, hideously attired in the skins of wild beasts, and a face which inspired the beholders with even greater horror than did the bloody dagger which he brandished aloft, reeking with a double murder.
“Ha! judges, where is Hans of Iceland now?”
“Guards, seize that monster!” cried the startled judge.