That night Baron Hardouin and Herbert slept on the gentle pleasures they had prepared for Zeyneb, the dwarf; but in the morning Aimer the seneschal came to his lord with a face long as a sculptured saint.
"The paynim dwarf!" was his trembling whisper; "he is gone!"
"Gone!" cried Hardouin, dropping the hawk's hood in his hand.
"Truly, my Baron," continued the worthy, "this morning, as we went to the dungeon, behold! Girart, the guard, was stretched on the floor dead, as I am a sinful man!"
"Fellow—fellow—" broke out the nobleman, beginning to quake.
"Art-magic, and direct presence of Satan, it must have been," moaned the seneschal, wringing his hands. "Girart was ever a sleepy knave; yet the infidel had slipped off his fetters. The lock was all pried asunder, and Girart's head beaten in, as though by a bit of iron, while he snored."
"Mary, ever Virgin!" swore the Baron, crossing himself. "Shall the devil go up and down in my own castle? Out, men, boys, varlets, all! scour the country! send riders to all the seigneurs about!"
And so they did, more thoroughly than ever in the camp at Clermont; but again the dwarf had melted out of human ken. True, when the messengers went as far as Marseilles, they heard a vague story that a dark-skinned hunchback had embarked on a merchantman of Cyprus; but even this tale lacked verification, and the simplest and most satisfactory account was that of old Nicole, the gate-keeper's wife, who protested by St. Jude that she had seen two horrible red dogs creeping around the barriers just as she went to bed,—sure sign of the presence of the dreadful devil Cahu, who was on hand to rescue his votary.
Only some days after, a groom found scratched on the stones of the castle's outer wall this inscription in Arabic: "To Cid Richard: three times are not four. There is a dagger that may pierce armor of Andalus. Remember." And below this, the rude sign of a poignard encircled by a noose.
"The token of the Ismaelians," commented Musa, when he read it. "Allah grant that the boast prove as vain as his earlier strokes! Yet I would you were going anywhere but to Syria."