"Is there a chain cable anywhere?" I asked.

"Not one in the place," he said; "and if we did get one across the
river, we should have to fight to keep the far end of it."

The tide was rising fast, and I thought we should surely lose every
ship, while Guthrum and his chiefs would escape us at the same
time. One might line the banks with archers, certainly, but that
would not stay the going. Evening was closing in, moreover. By
midnight they would be gone, and I was in a difficulty out of which
I could not see my way.

Suddenly Thord smote his hands together, and his face grew
brighter.

"I have it," he cried. "There is an old vessel that lies in a creek
a mile down the river. A great buss {xvi} she is, and worth
nothing; but she will float, and maybe will be afloat now. If we
can sink her across the channel in a place that I know, not one of
these ships will get away till she is raised."

Then I called every man to me whom I could see, and we went quickly
to the place where this buss was, and she was just afloat. Thord
knew where her tackle was kept, and he had the oars out--what there
were of them at least, for they were old and rotten enough. Then we
had to shove her off and get her boat into the water, and the
vessel itself floated up on the tide towards the narrow place where
she might best be sunk to block the channel against ships that came
from the town.

We had not gone far when there came a sound at which I started, for
it was nothing more or less than the quick beat of oars coming down
the river against the tide. Thord and I and eight men of my own
crew were in the buss, while I had maybe thirty men ashore who were
keeping pace with us along the bank. The rest of my own men were
with these, and one shouted that he could see the ship, and that it
was our own, crammed with men too.

Now at first it seemed as if the only thing for us to do was to go
ashore in the boat as quickly as we could and get away; but Thord
cried to me:

"Then will the Danes take our ship to sea, and we have lost her for
good. It should not be said of us that we let her go without a blow
struck to save her."

"Sink this hulk straightway, then," I said, falling to work, with
the axe I had in thy hand, on the lowest strakes. My men leaped to
work as well, and in two minutes the seams began to gape, and then
was a rush of water from broken planking that sent us over the side
and into the boat in hot haste.

Then we pulled fo