d to be caught in
the open by the outlaws, that filled the coffers of Norman of Torn with
many pieces of gold and silver, and placed a price upon his head ere he
had scarce turned eighteen.

That he had no fear of or desire to avoid responsibility for his acts,
he grimly evidenced by marking with a dagger's point upon the foreheads
of those who fell before his own sword the initials NT.

As his following and wealth increased, he rebuilt and enlarged the grim
Castle of Torn, and again dammed the little stream which had furnished
the moat with water in bygone days.

Through all the length and breadth of the country that witnessed
his activities, his very name was worshipped by poor and lowly and
oppressed. The money he took from the King's tax gatherers, he returned
to the miserable peasants of the district, and once when Henry III sent
a little expedition against him, he surrounded and captured the entire
force, and, stripping them, gave their clothing to the poor, and
escorted them, naked, back to the very gates of London.

By the time he was twenty, Norman the Devil, as the King himself had
dubbed him, was known by reputation throughout all England, though no
man had seen his face and lived other than his friends and followers.
He had become a power to reckon with in the fast culminating quarrel
between King Henry and his foreign favorites on one side, and the Saxon
and Norman barons on the other.

Neither side knew which way his power might be turned, for Norman of
Torn had preyed almost equally upon royalist and insurgent. Personally,
he had decided to join neither party, but to take advantage of the
turmoil of the times to prey without partiality upon both.

As Norman of Torn approached his grim castle home with his five filthy,
ragged cut-throats on the day of his first meeting with them, the old
man of Torn stood watching the little party from one of the small towers
of the barbican.

Halting beneath this outer gate, the youth winded the horn which hung at
his side in mimicry of the custom of the times.

"What ho, without there!" challenged the old man entering grimly into
the spirit of the play.

"'Tis Sir Norman of Torn," spoke up Red Shandy, "with his great host
of noble knights and men-at-arms and squires and lackeys and sumpter
beasts. Open in the name of the good right arm of Sir Norman of Torn."

"What means this, my son?" said the old man as Norman of Torn dismounted
within the ballium.

The