trampling of the feet of so many horses,
people began to throng to their doors, and children peered out at windows
and cried to each other shrilly: "See the Christians!"

For so, being but lately pagans themselves, if not partly so to this
day, these outlandish men of the border No Man's Land denominated us of
the south.

Presently we came to an open space sloping away from the sheer cliff,
where was a wall and a door greater than the others.

Jorian rode directly up to the gate, which was of the same dull
brick-red as the rest of the curious town. He took the butt of his lance
and thumped and banged lustily upon it. For a time there was no reply,
but the number of heads thrust out at neighboring windows and the swarms
of townsfolk on the pathways before and behind us enormously increased.

Jorian thundered again, kicking with his foot and swearing explosively in
mingled Wendish and German. Then he took the point of his spear, and,
setting it to a hole in the wall above his head, he hooked out an entire
wooden window-frame, as one is taught to pull out a shrimp with a pin on
the shore of the Baltic Sea.

Whereupon a sudden outcry arose within the house, and a head popped
angrily out of the aperture so suddenly created. But as instantly it
returned within. For Jorian tossed the lattice to the ground by the door
and thrust his spear-head into the cravat of red which the man had about
his throat, shouting to him all the while in the name of the Prince, of
the Duke, of the Emperor, of the Archbishop, of all potentates, lay and
secular, to come down and open the gates. The man in the red cravat was
threatened with the strappado, with the water-torture, with the
brodequins, and finally with the devil's cannon--which, according to our
man-at-arms, was to be planted on the opposite bank of the ravine, and
which would infallibly bring the whole of their wretched town tumbling
down into the gulf like swallows' nests from under the eaves.

And this last threat seemed to have more weight than all the rest,
probably because the Prince of Plassenburg had already done something of
the kind to some other similar town, and the earth-burrowers of Erdborg
had good reason to fear the thunder of his artillery.

At all events, the great door opened, and a man of the same brick-red as
all the other inhabitants of the town appeared at the portal. He bowed
profoundly, and Jorian addressed him in some outlandishly compounded
speech, of wh