Up from the gray rocks, rising sheer and bold and bare, stood the walls
and towers of Castle Drachenhausen. A great gate-way, with a heavy
iron-pointed portcullis hanging suspended in the dim arch above, yawned
blackly upon the bascule or falling drawbridge that spanned a chasm
between the blank stone walls and the roadway that ran winding down the
steep rocky slope to the little valley just beneath. There in the lap of
the hills around stood the wretched straw-thatched huts of the peasants
belonging to the castle--miserable serfs who, half timid, half fierce,
tilled their poor patches of ground, wrenching from the hard soil barely
enough to keep body and soul together. Among those vile hovels played
the little children like foxes about their dens, their wild, fierce eyes
peering out from under a mat of tangled yellow hair.
Beyond these squalid huts lay the rushing, foaming river, spanned by a
high, rude, stone bridge where the road from the castle crossed it, and
beyond the river stretched the great, black forest, within whose gloomy
depths the savage wild beasts made their lair, and where in winter time
the howling wolves coursed their flying prey across the moonlit snow and
under the net-work of the black shadows from the naked boughs above.
The watchman in the cold, windy bartizan or watch-tower that clung to
the gray walls above the castle gateway, looked from his narrow window,
where the wind piped and hummed, across the tree-tops that rolled in
endless billows of green, over hill and over valley to the blue and
distant slope of the Keiserberg, where, on the mountain side, glimmered
far away the walls of Castle Trutz-Drachen.
Within the massive stone walls through which the gaping gateway led,
three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that even the
yellow sunlight could not light them into brightness, looked down, with
row upon row of windows, upon three sides of the bleak, stone courtyard.
Back of and above them clustered a jumble of other buildings, tower and
turret, one high-peaked roof overtopping another.
The great house in the centre was the Baron’s Hall, the part to the left
was called the Roderhausen; between the two stood a huge square pile,
rising dizzily up into the clear air high above the rest--the great
Melchior Tower.
At the top clustered a jumble of buildings hanging high aloft in the
windy space; a crooked wooden belfry, a tall, narrow watch-tower, and a
rude wooden house that clung partly to the roof of the great tower and
partly to the walls.
From the chimney of this crazy hut a thin thread of smoke would now and
then rise into the air, for there were folk living far up in that empty,
airy desert, and oftentimes wild, uncouth little children were seen
playing on the edge of the dizzy height, or sitting with their bare
legs hanging down over the sheer depths, as they gazed below at what was
going on in the court-yard. There they sat, just as little children in
the town might sit upon their father’s door-step; and as the sparrows
might fly around the feet of the little town children, so the circling
flocks of rooks and daws flew around the feet of these air-born
creatures.
It was Schwartz Carl and his wife and little ones who lived far up there
in the Melchior Tower, for it overlooked the top of the hill behind the
castle and so down into the valley upon the further side. There, day
after day, Schwartz Carl kept watch upon the gray road that ran like a
ribbon through the valley, from the rich town of Gruenstaldt to the rich
town of Staffenburgen, where passed merchant caravans from the one to
the other--for the lord of Drachenhausen was a robber baron.
Dong! Dong! The great alarm bell would suddenly ring out from the belfry
high up upon the Melchior Tower. Dong! Dong! Till the rooks and daws
whirled clamoring and screaming. Dong! Dong! Till the fierce wolf-hounds
in the rocky kennels behind the castle stables howled dismally in
answer. Dong! Dong!--Dong! Dong!
Then would follow a great noise and uproar and hurry in the castle
court-yard below; men shouting and calling to one another, the ringing
of armor, and the clatter of horses’ hoofs upon the hard stone. With the
creaking and groaning of the windlass the iron-pointed portcullis would
be slowly raised, and with a clank and rattle and clash of iron chains
the drawbridge would fall crashing. Then over it would thunder horse and
man, clattering away down the winding, stony pathway, until the great
forest would swallow them, and they would be gone.
Then for a while peace would fall upon the castle courtyard, the cock
would crow, the cook would scold a lazy maid, and Gretchen, leaning out
of a window, would sing a snatch of a song, just as though it were a
peaceful farm-house, instead of a den of robbers.
Maybe it would be evening before the men would return once more. Perhaps
one would have a bloody cloth bound about his head, perhaps one would
carry his arm in a sling; perhaps one--maybe more than one--would be
left behind, never to return again, and soon forgotten by all excepting
some poor woman who would weep silently in the loneliness of her daily
work.
Nearly always the adventurers would bring back with them pack-horses
laden with bales of goods. Sometimes, besides these, they would return
with a poor soul, his hands tied behind his back and his feet beneath
the horse’s body, his fur cloak and his flat cap wofully awry. A while
he would disappear in some gloomy cell of the dungeon-keep, until an
envoy would come from the town with a fat purse, when his ransom would
be paid, the dungeon would disgorge him, and he would be allowed to go
upon his way again.
One man always rode beside Baron Conrad in his expeditions and
adventures—a short, deep-chested, broad-shouldered man, with sinewy arms
so long that when he stood his hands hung nearly to his knees.
His coarse, close-clipped hair came so low upon his brow that only a
strip of forehead showed between it and his bushy, black eyebrows. One
eye was blind; the other twinkled and gleamed like a spark under the
penthouse of his brows. Many folk said that the one-eyed Hans had drunk
beer with the Hill-man, who had given him the strength of ten, for he
could bend an iron spit like a hazel twig, and could lift a barrel of
wine from the floor to his head as easily as though it were a basket of
eggs.
As for the one-eyed Hans he never said that he had not drunk beer with
the Hill-man, for he liked the credit that such reports gave him with
the other folk. And so, like a half savage mastiff, faithful to death
to his master, but to him alone, he went his sullen way and lived his
sullen life within the castle walls, half respected, half feared by the
other inmates, for it was dangerous trifling with the one-eyed Hans.