, moved a step to the right so as to
face him fairly. Suddenly the great horns came down with a vindictive
sweep, the shoulders heaved in the first impulse of the coming charge.
Like the snap of a whip the report rang out clean and sharp, and the
bullet went home at just the one vulnerable point in the thick
skull--that at which the butcher aims his pole-axe. The bull pulled up
short, the glaring eyes softened as though in wonder at this strange
performance that had been enacted before him; then, as the people still
held their breath, the brute sank quietly to his knees and rolled over
dead.

A woman started in to laugh hysterically, but her voice was drowned in a
mighty shout; like a wave the crowd passed over the barrier, and
Constans grasped helplessly at half a hundred out-stretched hands. A
babel of voices arose; the arena, filled to overflowing with excited men
and women, was comparable only to some gigantic ant-hill.

Fifty yards outside of the main palisade stood an oak-tree. Under the
Stockader law no standing timber should have been permitted at a less
distance than one hundred paces, but the oak was such a fine specimen
that Red Oxenford had allowed it to remain--a fatal error.

A bowstring twanged; the arrow sped to its mark--the fair young breast
of Oxenford's daughter--and in her father's arms the maiden gasped and
died; all this in the space of time in which a cloud of the bigness of a
man's hand might pass across the sun. Down from the lower branches of
that accursed oak dropped the lithe figure of a man garbed all in gray.
"Stop him!" called a weak, uncertain voice, but no one moved. The man in
gray waved his hand derisively and disappeared into the bush. An
inarticulate sound arose from the closely packed throng in the
enclosure, the exhalation of a universal sigh.

Red Oxenford had made neither sound nor sign. He stood motionless, his
daughter's head cradled in the hollow of his arm; he stared stupidly at
the girl's face, so pitifully white and small it seemed, with its
virginal coronal of flaxen hair--then he fell in a heap, like to a
collapsing wall.

Piers Major gently withdrew the bolt from the wound and held it up to
view. Its message was plain to all, for none save the Doomsmen feathered
their arrows with the plume of the gray goose. Only now the quills were
stained to a darker hue.

"It is her blood," he said, and the shaft of polished hickory snapped
like a straw between his fingers. "H