Torn, upon pain of
death, but nevertheless his great carts made their trips regularly and
always returned full laden, and though the husbandmen told sad tales
to their overlords of the awful raids of the Devil of Torn in which he
seized upon their stuff by force, their tongues were in their cheeks as
they spoke and the Devil's gold in their pockets.

And so, while the barons learned to hate him the more, the peasants'
love for him increased. Them he never injured; their fences, their
stock, their crops, their wives and daughters were safe from molestation
even though the neighboring castle of their lord might be sacked from
the wine cellar to the ramparts of the loftiest tower. Nor did anyone
dare ride rough shod over the territory which Norman of Torn patrolled.
A dozen bands of cut-throats he had driven from the Derby hills, and
though the barons would much rather have had all the rest than he, the
peasants worshipped him as a deliverer from the lowborn murderers who
had been wont to despoil the weak and lowly and on whose account the
women of the huts and cottages had never been safe.

Few of them had seen his face and fewer still had spoken with him, but
they loved his name and his prowess and in secret they prayed for him
to their ancient god, Wodin, and the lesser gods of the forest and the
meadow and the chase, for though they were confessed Christians, still
in the hearts of many beat a faint echo of the old superstitions of
their ancestors; and while they prayed also to the Lord Jesus and to
Mary, yet they felt it could do no harm to be on the safe side with the
others, in case they did happen to exist.

A poor, degraded, downtrodden, ignorant, superstitious people, they
were; accustomed for generations to the heel of first one invader and
then another and in the interims, when there were any, the heels of
their feudal lords and their rapacious monarchs.

No wonder then that such as these worshipped the Outlaw of Torn, for
since their fierce Saxon ancestors had come, themselves as conquerors,
to England, no other hand had ever been raised to shield them from
oppression.

On this policy of his toward the serfs and freedmen, Norman of Torn and
the grim, old man whom he called father had never agreed. The latter was
for carrying his war of hate against all Englishmen, but the young man
would neither listen to it, nor allow any who rode out from Torn to
molest the lowly. A ragged tunic was a surer defence aga