They had travelled for six hours through high arched pines, their fallen needles making a carpet green and springy underfoot. Then succeeded oaks, stricken a little at top with the frosts of years. Alternating with these came marshy tracts where alder and white birch gleamed from the banks of shallow runnels and the margins of black peaty lakes. Anon the broom and the gorse began to flourish sparsely above wide sand-hills, heaved this way and that like the waves of a mountainous sea.

The party was approaching that no-man's-land which stretches for upwards of a hundred miles along the southern shores of the Baltic. It is a land of vast brackish backwaters connected with the outer sea by devious channels often half silted up, but still feeling the pulse of the outer green water in the winds which blow over the sandy "bills," bars, and spits, and bring with them sweet scents of heather and wild thyme, and, most of all, of the southernwood which grows wild on the scantily pastured braes.

It was at that time a beautiful but lonely country—the 'batable land of half a dozen princedoms, its only inhabitant a stray hunter setting up his gipsy booth of wattled boughs, heaping with stones a rude fireplace, or fixing a tripod over it whereon a pottinger was presently a-swing, in some sunny curve of the shore.

At eventide of the third day of their journeying the party came to a great morass. Black decaying trunks of trees stood up at various angles, often bristling with dead branches like chevaux-de-frise. The horses picked their path warily through this tangle, the rotten sticks yielding as readily and silently as wet mud beneath their hoofs. Finally all dismounted except Joan, while Werner von Orseln, with a rough map in his hand, traced out the way. Pools of stagnant black water had to be evaded, treacherous yellow sands tested, bridges constructed of the firmer logs, till all suddenly they came out upon a fairylike little half-moon of sand and tiny shells.

Here was a large flat-bottomed boat, drawn up against the shore. In the stern a strange figure was seated, a man, tall and angular, clad in jerkin and trunks of brown tanned leather, cross-gartered hose of grey cloth, and home-made shoon of hide with the hair outside. He wore a black skull cap, and his head had the strange, uncanny look of a wild animal. It was not at the first glance nor yet at the second that Boris and Jorian found out the cause of this curious appearance.

Meanwhile Werner von Orseln was putting into his hand some pledge or sign which he scrutinised carefully, when Jorian suddenly gripped his companion's arm.

"Look," he whispered, "he's got no ears!"

"Nor any tongue!" responded Boris, staring with all his eyes at the prodigy.

And, indeed, the strange man was pointing to his mouth with the index finger of his right hand and signing that they were to follow him into the boat which had been waiting for them.

Joan of the Sword Hand had never spoken since she knew that her men were taking her to a place of safety. Nor did her face show any trace of emotion now that Werner von Orseln, approaching cap in hand, humbly begged her to permit him to conduct her to the boat.

But the Duchess leapt from her horse, and without accepting his hand she stepped from the little pier of stone beside which the boat lay. Then walking firmly from seat to seat she reached the stern, where she sat down without seeming to have glanced at any of the company.

Werner von Orseln then motioned Captains Boris and Jorian to take their places in the bow, and having bared his head he seated himself beside his mistress. The wordless earless man took the oars and pushed off. The boat slid over a little belt of still water through a wilderness of tall reeds. Then all suddenly the wavelets lapped crisp and clean beneath her bottom, and the wide levels of a lake opened out before them. The ten men left on the shore set about building a fire and making shelters of brushwood, as if they expected to stay here some time.

The tiny harbour was fenced in on every side with an unbroken wall of lofty green pines. The lower part of their trunks shot up tall and straight and opened long vistas into the black depths of the forest. The sun was setting and threw slant rays far underneath, touching with gold the rank marish growths, and reddening the mouldering boles of the fallen pines.

The boat passed almost noiselessly along, the strange man rowing strongly and the boat drawing steadily away across the widest part of the still inland sea. As they thus coasted along the gloomy shores the sun went down and darkness came upon them at a bound. Then at the far end of the long tunnel, which an hour agone had been sunny glades, they saw strange flickering lights dancing and vanishing, waving and leaping upward—will-o'-the-wisps kindled doubtless from the stagnant boglands and the rotting vegetation of that ancient northern forest.

The breeze freshened. The water clappered louder under the boat's quarter. Breaths born of the wide sea unfiltered through forest dankness visited more keenly the nostrils of the voyagers. They heard ahead of them the distant roar of breakers. Now and then there came a long and gradual roll underneath their quarter, quite distinct from the little chopping waves of the fresh-water haff, as the surface of the mere heaved itself in a great slope of water upon which the boat swung sideways.

After a space tall trees again shot up overhead, and with a quick turn the boat passed between walls of trembling reeds that rustled against the oars like silk, emerged on a black circle of water, and then, gliding smoothly forward, took ground in the blank dark.

As the broad keel grated on the sand, the Wordless Man leapt out, and, standing on the shore, put his hands to his mouth and emitted a long shout like a blast blown on a conch shell. Again and again that melancholy ululation, with never a consonantal sound to break it, went forth into the night. Yet it was so modulated that it had obviously a meaning for some one, and to put the matter beyond a doubt it was answered by three shrill whistles from behind the rampart of trees.

Joan sat still in the boat where she had placed herself. She asked no question, and even these strange experiences did not alter her resolution.

Presently a light gleamed uncertainly through the trees, now lost behind brushwood and again breaking waveringly out.

A tall figure moved forward with a step quick and firm. It was that of a woman who carried a swinging lantern in her hand, from which wheeling lights gleamed through a score of variously coloured little plates of horn. She wore about her shoulders a great crimson cloak which masked her shape. A hood of the same material, attached at the back of the neck to the cloak, concealed her head and dropped about her face, partially hiding her features.

Standing still on a little wooden pier she held the lantern high, so that the light fell directly on those in the boat, and their faces looked strangely white in that illumined circle, surrounded as it was by a pent-house of tense blackness—black pines, black water, black sky.

"Follow me!" said the woman, in a deep rich voice—a voice whose tones thrilled those who heard them to their hearts, so full and low were some of the notes.

Joan of the Sword Hand rose to her feet.

"I am the Duchess of Hohenstein, and I do not leave this boat till I know in what place I am, and who this may be that cries 'Follow!' to the daughter of Henry the Lion!"

The tall woman turned without bowing and looked at the girl.

"I am the mother of Maurice von Lynar, and this is the Isle Rugen!" she said simply, as if the answer were all sufficient.