Page:The Bondman; A New Saga (IA bondmannewsaga00cain).djvu/23

 threw the weight of his body forward, and like a green withe Patriksen doubled backwards with a groan. Then at a rush of the islander's kinsmen, and a cry that his back would be broken, the young man loosed his grip, and Patriksen rolled from him to the earth, as a clod rolls from the ploughshare.

All this time Jorgen's daughter had craned her neck to look over the heads of the people, and when the tussle was at an end, her face, which had been strained to the point of anguish, relaxed to smiles, and she turned to her father and asked if the champion's belt should not be his who had overcome the champion. But Jorgen answered no—that the contest was over, and judgment made, and he who would take the champion's belt must come to the next Althing and earn it. Then the girl unlocked her necklace of coral and silver spangles, beckoned the young man to her, bound the necklace about his broken arm close up by the shoulder, and asked him his name.

"Stephen," he answered.

"Whose son?" said she.

"Orryson—but they call me Stephen Orry."

"Of what craft?"

"Seaman, of Stappen, under Snaefell, Jökull."

The Westmann islander had rolled to his legs by this time, and now he came shambling up, with the belt in his hand and his sullen eyes on the ground.

"Keep it," he said, and flung the belt at the girl's feet, between her and his adversary. Then he strode away through the throng, with curses on his white lips and the veins of his squat forehead swollen and dark.

It was midnight before the crowds had broken up and straggled back to their tents, but the sun of this northern land was still half above the horizon, and its dull red glow was on the waters of the lake that lay to the west of the valley. In the dim light of an hour later, when the hills of Thingvellir slept under the cloud-shadow that was their only night, Stephen Orry stood with the Governor's daughter by the door of the Thingvellir parsonage, for Jorgen's company were the parson's guests. He held out the champion's belt to her and said, "Take it back, for if I keep it the man and his kinsmen will follow me all the days of my life."

She answered him that it was his, for he had won it, and until it was taken from him he must hold it, and if he stood in peril from the kinsmen of any man let him remember that it was she, daughter of the Governor himself, who had given