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Alric ran into the water till he was about knee-deep, and then plunged his spear.
If need be, go all the round thyself, and rest not as long as wind and limb hold out. Thy fighting days have begun early," he added in a softer tone, as he passed his large hand gently over the fair head of the boy, "perchance they will end early. But, whatever betide, Alric, quit thee like a man as thou art truly in heart if not in limb."
But the smith had not been to the preaching, because Alric, the Saxon groom, had brought him Gilbert's horse to shoe just when he was going, and had forced him to stay and do the work with the threat of an evil spell learned in Italy. And now, peering through the twilight, he stood watching the long procession as it came up to his door.
"Hilda has strange thoughts," observed the boy. "So has Erling," remarked his companion. "And so has Ada," said Alric, with a sly glance. Glumm looked up quickly. "What knowest thou about Ada?" said he. The sly look vanished before Glumm had time to observe it, and an expression of extreme innocence took its place as the lad replied
Alric glanced at the precipice on his left, full thirty feet deep, with the sea below; at the precipice on his right, which rose an unknown height above; at the steep rugged path behind, and at the wild rugged man in front, who could have clutched him with one bound; and admitted in his heart that escape was impossible.
After a few seconds of violent and wild exertion it rushed down the pool into the rapid, and then it was that the girls perceived that Alric had struck and was clinging to one of the largest-sized salmon that ever appeared in Horlingdal river.
"Three or four years!" exclaimed Alric, to whom such a space of time appeared an age. "Why, there will be no more fighting left to be done at the end of three or four years.
He had intended, therefore, to have warned Alric to watch the Swan past a certain point before sounding the alarm at Ulfstede. But Alric had already formed his own opinions on the subject, and resolved to act on them. He suspected that Erling, in his thirst for glory, meant to have all the fun to himself, and to attack the Danes with his single boat's crew of fifty or sixty men.
Old Hans himself answered the thought by opening the door at that moment. He was a short, thick-set, and very powerful man, of apparently sixty years of age, but his eye was as bright and his step as light as that of many a man of twenty. "The war-token," he said, almost gaily, stepping back into the cottage as Alric leaped in. "What is doing, son of Haldor?"
This was part of it," he added, buckling on a long hunting-knife, which was stuck in a richly ornamented sheath, "and that silver tankard too, besides the red mantle that my mother wears, and a few other things but my comrades got the most of it." "I wish I had been there, Glumm," said Alric. "If Hilda were here, lad, she would say it is wrong to wish to fight."
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