a place just inside the
trenched enclosure, and there were old stone walls, such as were
none elsewhere in the place, but as it might have been part of
Burgh or Brancaster walls that the Romans made on our shores, so
ancient that they were crumbling to decay. There they set him down,
and raised a great flat stone, close to the greatest wall, which
covered the mouth of a deep pit.

"Look therein," said Ingvar to me.

I looked, and saw that the pit was stone walled and deep, and that
out of it was no way but this hole above. The walls and floor were
damp and slimy; and when I looked closer, the dim light showed me
bones in one corner, and also that over the floor crawled reptiles,
countless.

"An adder is a small thing to sting a man," said Ingvar in his grim
voice. "Nor will it always hurt him much. Yet if a man is so close
among many that he must needs tread on one, and it bites him, and
in fleeing that he must set foot on another, and again another, and
then more--how will that end?"

I shuddered and turned away.

"In such a place did Ella of Northumbria put my forebear, Ragnar
Lodbrok; and there he sang the song {xiii} we hold most
wondrous of all. There he was set because he was feared, and
Northumbria knows what I thought of that matter. But Beorn goes
here for reasons which you know. And East Anglia shall know what my
thoughts are of those reasons."

Then two men seized Beorn and cast him into that foul pit, stripped
of all things, and the stone fell.

But Beorn moved not nor cried out, and I think that even as
Ulfkytel had boded, stripped of life itself was he before the
bottom of the pit was reached.

So the justice of Ulfkytel the Earl came to pass. But the lies
spoken by Beorn were not yet paid for.

CHAPTER IX. JARL HALFDEN'S HOMECOMING.

From the time when Beorn was made to speak the truth, I was a
welcome guest in the hall that had been Lodbrok's, to Hubba at
least, and we were good friends. As for Ingvar, he was friendly
enough also, and would listen when I spoke with his more frank and
open brother of my days with Halfden and his father. But he took
little pleasure in my company, going silent and moody about the
place, for the snow that began on the day after I landed was the
first of a great storm, fiercer and colder than any we knew in
England, and beyond the courtyard of the great house men could
scarcely stir for a time.

This storm I had but just escaped, and it seemed to me, an