e jester recognize the archer who had won the prize
at the tournament and who was known as Locksley.

"What is the meaning of all this?" the man demanded. "Who are they that
rifle and ransom and make prisoners in these forests?"

"You may look at their cassocks close by," replied Wamba, "and see
whether they be thy children's coats or no, for they are as like thine
own as one green pea-pod is like another."

"I will learn that presently," returned Locksley: "and I charge ye, on
peril of your lives, not to stir from this place where ye stand until I
have returned. Obey me, and it shall be the better for you and your
masters. Yet stay; I must render myself as like these men as possible."

So saying, he drew a [v]vizard from his pouch, and, repeating his
charges to them to stand fast, went to reconnoitre.

"Shall we stay, Gurth?" asked Wamba; "or shall we give him [v]leg-bail?
In my foolish mind, he had all the equipage of a thief too much in
readiness to be himself a true man."

"Let him be the devil," said Gurth, "an he will. We can be no worse for
waiting his return. If he belongs to that party, he must already have
given them the alarm, and it will avail us nothing either to fight or
fly."

The yeoman returned in the course of a few minutes.

"Friend Gurth," he said, "I have mingled among yon men and have learned
to whom they belong, and whither they are bound. There is, I think, no
chance that they will proceed to any actual violence against their
prisoners. For three men to attack them at this moment were little else
than madness; for they are good men of war and have, as such, placed
sentinels to give the alarm when any one approaches. But I trust soon to
gather such a force as may act in defiance of all their precautions. You
are both servants, and, as I think, faithful servants of Cedric the
Saxon, the friend of the rights of Englishmen. He shall not want English
hands to help him in this extremity. Come then with me, until I gather
more aid."

So saying, he walked through the wood at a great pace, followed by the
jester and the swineherd. The three men proceeded with occasional
converse but, for the most part, in silence for about three hours.
Finally they arrived at a small opening in the forest, in the center of
which grew an oak-tree of enormous magnitude, throwing its twisted
branches in every direction. Beneath this tree four or five yeomen lay
stretched on the ground, while another, as sentinel, w