swung
his leg free, and caught the rash fellow a vicious kick in the face that
had felled him, stunned and bleeding.

The roar from the man's companions told Lanciotto what to expect. In an
instant they were upon him, clamouring for his blood. He sought to draw
his master's sword, which together with the Count's other armour was
slung across his saddle-bow; but before he could extricate it, he was
seized by a dozen hands, and cropped, fighting, from the saddle. On the
ground they overpowered him, and a mailed hand was set upon his mouth,
crushing back into his throat the cry for help he would have raised.

On the west side of the courtyard a fountain issuing from the wall
had once poured its water through a lion's head into a vast tank of
moss-grown granite. But it had been disused for some time, and the pipe
in the lion's mouth was dry. The tank, however, was more than half full
of water, which, during the late untenanting of the castle, had turned
foul and stagnant. To drown Lanciotto in this was the amiable suggestion
that emanated from Fortemani himself--a suggestion uproariously received
by his knaves, who set themselves to act upon it. They roughly dragged
the bleeding and frantically struggling Lanciotto across the yard and
gained the border of the tank, intending fully to sink him into it and
hold him under, to drown there like a rat.

But in that instant a something burst upon him like a bolt from out of
Heaven. In one or two, and presently in more, the cruel laughter turned
to sudden howls of pain as a lash of bullock-hide caught them about head
and face and shoulders.

"Back there, you beasts, you animals, back!" roared a voice of thunder,
and back they went unquestioning before that pitiless lash, like the
pack of craven hounds they were.

It was Francesco, who, single-handed, and armed with no more than a
whip, was scattering them from about his maltreated servant, as the hawk
scatters a flight of noisy sparrows. And now between him and Lanciotto
there stood no more than the broad bulk of Ercole Fortemani, his back to
the Count; for, as yet, he had not realised the interruption.

Francesco dropped his whip, and setting one hand at the captain's
girdle, and the other at his dirty neck, he hoisted him up with a
strength incredible, and hurled him from his path and into the slimy
water of the tank.

There was a mighty roar drowned in a mightier splash as Fortemani,
spread-eagle, struck the surface and