Page:Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (Volume 3).djvu/160

148 with him to all places, battles, tournaments, hunts, and what not? Well, once upon a time it happened that this young gentleman of Wippach was present with many other knights and nobles at a great hunt held by the duke. And in this hunt the dogs turned up a stag upon which a man was seated ringing his hands and crying piteously: for, in those days, there was a tyrannical custom among the great lords that, when a poor man had committed any slight matter of trespass against the forest-laws, they would take and bind him on the back of a stag, so that he was bruised and gored to death by the herd—or, if he escaped dying that way, he perished of hunger and thirst. Well, when the duke saw this—oh lord! but he was angry; and gave command to stop the hunting; and there and then he promised a high reward to any man that would undertake to hit the stag—but threatened him with his severest displeasure in case he wounded the man; for he was resolved, if possible, to take him alive—that he might learn who it was that had been bold enough to break his law which forbade