rn Herjulfsson's mild gaze that the word stuck in the fellow's
throat, and instinctively he leaped backward.

Leif turned from him disdainfully, and addressed the men of his old
crew. "Ye are free men," he said; "but I am the chief to whom, of your
own free wills, you have sworn allegiance on the edge of your swords. Do
you think it improves your honor that a stranger should dare to insult
your chosen leader in your presence?"

"No!" bellowed Valbrand, in a voice of thunder.

And Lodin shook his wounded arm at the mutineer. "If my hand could close
over a sword, I would split you open with it," he cried.

The other men's slumbering pride awoke. Loyalty seldom took more than
cat-naps in those days, in spite of all the hard work that was put upon
her.

"Duck him!"--"Souse him!"--"Dip him in the ocean!" they shouted. And so
energetically that the ringleader, cursing the fickleness of rebels,
found it all at once advisable to whip out his sword and fall into a
posture of defence.

But again Leif's hand was stretched forth.

"Let him be," he said. "He is a stranger among us, and your own words
are responsible for his mistake. Let him be, and show your loyalty to
your leader by carrying out his orders with no more unseemly delay."

They obeyed him silently, if reluctantly; and it was not long before
those who had remained on ship-board were thrown into a second fever of
envious excitement.

They were not pleasant, however, the days that followed. In the flesh of
those who had missed the sport, the bear-fight was as a rankling thorn.
The watches, during which a northeast gale kept them scudding through
empty seas with little to do and much time to gossip, were golden hours
for the growth of the serpent of discontent. Though the creature did not
dare to strike again, its hiss could be heard in the distance, and the
gleam of its fangs showed in dark corners. If Leif had had Biorn's bad
fortune, to begin at the wrong end of his journey, so that a barren
Helluland was the climax that now lay before him, the hidden snake might
have swelled, like Thora Borga Hiort's serpent-pet, into a devastating
dragon.

Was it not Leif's luck that the land which was revealed to them, on the
third morning, should be as much fairer than their vaunted Markland as
that spot was pleasanter than Greenland's wastes?--a land where, as the
old books tell, vines grew wild upon the hills, and wheat upon the
plains; where the rivers teemed with fi