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watched him until he had fixed in his mind every line of his tall, broad figure, every gesture of his hand and every toss of his head. He then walked off, and when he turned to look back a last time Sir John was gone.

‘‘What was that he said of hanging?’’ Martin whispered.

The fellow’s face was so white and his lips and his bruises were so blue that Phil laughed at him before his eyes, who thereupon lost his temper and snarled, “It’s all well enough to take things lightly, you who got no beating; but hanging is no laughing matter.”

He then looked cautiously around and ran back the way they had come. When he returned he held between thumb and forefinger the silver coin Phil had thrown back at the burly knight. Martin bought food with it and Phil, though he thought it would have choked him, helped him eat it; and so they survived the day.

“That keeper, Barwick,” Martin said that evening as the two tramped west along the highway, "is my brother, and an ungrateful wretch he is.”

“I knew he was your brother,’’ Phil said. But he was not thinking of Martin or his brother. He was thinking of the old knight in the scarlet cloak so bravely decked with silver lace. There was only one man Philip Marsham had ever known, who had such a rough, just, heavy-handed humour as Sir John Bristol or any such indomitable sense of fair play, and that man was Phil’s dead father.