"
Spake the first man again, and his voice quavered yet more:
"Nay nay, Otter, it is not so. Lo you the skeleton and the bones
and the grey stones! And the fire, here this minute, there the next.
O Otter, this is an evil place of an evil deed! Let us go
seek elsewhere; let us depart, lest a worse thing befall us."
And so with no more ado he turned his horse and smote his
spurs into him and galloped off by the way he had come,
and the others followed, nothing loth; only Otter tarried
a little, and looked around him and laughed and said:
"There goes my Lord's nephew; like my Lord he is not over bold,
save in dealing with a shackled man. Well, for my part if
those others have sunk into the earth, or gone up into the air,
they are welcome to their wizardry, and I am glad of it.
For I know not how I should have done to have seen my mate
that out-tilted me made a gelded wretch of; and it would have
irked me to see that fair woman in the hands of the tormentors,
though forsooth I have oft seen such sights. Well, it is good;
but better were it to ride with my mate than serve the Devil
and his Nephew."
Therewith he turned rein and galloped off after the others,
and in a little while the sound of them had died off utterly
into the night, and they heard but the voices of the wild things,
and the wimbrel laughing from the hill-sides. Then came the Sage
and drew the cloak from those two, and laughed on them and said:
"Now may ye sleep soundly, when I have mended our fire;
for ye will see no more of Utterbol for this time, and it yet lacks
three hours of dawn: sleep ye then and dream of each other.
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