y
yelled all the time.

"Oh, this is no kind of fighting for brave men!" Thorfinn cried angrily.

The Norsemen's swords swung fast, and many of the strangers died under
them, but still others came on, throwing stones and swinging stone axes.
The horrible yelling and the strange things that the savages did
frightened the Norsemen.

"These are not men," some one cried.

Then those Norsemen who had never been afraid of anything turned and
ran. But when they came to the top of a rough hill Thorfinn cried:

"What are we doing? Shall we die here in this empty land with no one to
bury us? We are leaving our women."

Then one of the women ran out of the hut where they were hiding.

"Give me a sword!" she cried. "I can drive them back. Are Norsemen not
better than these savages?"

Then those warriors stopped, ashamed, and stood up before the wild men
and fought so fiercely that the strangers turned and fled down to their
canoes and paddled away.

"Oh, I am glad they are gone!" Thorfinn said. "It was an ugly fight."

"Thor would not have loved that battle," one said.

"It was no battle," another replied. "It was like fighting against an
army of poisonous flies."

The Norsemen were all worn and bleeding and sore. They went to their
huts and dressed their wounds, and the women helped them. At supper that
night they talked about the fight for a long time.

"I will not stay here," Gudrid said. "Perhaps these wild men have gone
away to get more people and will come back and kill us. Oh! they are
ugly."

"Perhaps brown faces are looking at us now from behind the trees in the
woods back there," said Biarni.

It was the wish of all to go home. So after a few days they sailed back
to Greenland with good weather all the way. The people at Eric's house
were very glad to see them.

"We were afraid you had died," they said.

"And I thought once that we should never leave Wineland alive," Thorfinn
answered.

Then they told all the story.

"I wonder why I had no such bad luck," Leif said. "But you have a better
shipload than I got."

He was looking at the bundles of furs and the kegs of wine.

"Yes," said Thorfinn, "we have come back richer than when we left. But I
will never go again for all the skins in the woods."

The next summer Thorfinn took Gudrid and Snorri and all his people and
sailed back to Iceland, his home. There he lived until he died. People
looked at him in wonder.

"That is the man who went to Wi