180 THE BOY CRUSADERS.

asked if they would become renegades, yes or no,
He who answered ‘ Yes,’ was put aside; but he who
answered ‘ No,’ was instantly beheaded.

Such was the plight of the Christian warriors who
so recently had boasted of being about to conquer
Kgypt. Already thirty thousand of the Crusaders
had perished; and the survivors were so wretched, that
they almost envied their comrades who had gone
where the weary are at rest.

Now in the midst of all this suffering and anxiety,
what had become of Guy Muschamp? Had the gay -
young squire, who boasted that if killed by the
Saracens he would die laughing, been drowned in the
Nile, or was he a captive in that large court sur-
rounded by walls of mud? Neither. But as our
narrative proceeds, the reader will see that Guy
Muschamp’s fate was hardly less sad than the fate of
those who had found a watery grave, or of those who
were offered the simple choice of denying their God
or losing their lives,