The winds of early winter sweep bitterly over Rosenheim, and all
the vast Bavarian plain was one white sheet of snow. If there had
not been whole armies of men at work always clearing the iron
rails of the snow, no trains could ever have run at all. Happily
for August, the thick wrappings in which the stove was enveloped
and the stoutness of its own make screened him from the cold, of
which, else, he must have died,--frozen. He had still some of his
loaf, and a little--a very little--of his sausage. What he did
begin to suffer from was thirst; and this frightened him almost
more than anything else, for Dorothea had read aloud to them one
night a story of the tortures some wrecked men had endured
because they could not find any water but the salt sea. It was
many hours since he had last taken a drink from the wooden spout
of their old pump, which brought them the sparkling, ice-cold
water of the hills.
But, fortunately for him, the stove, having been marked and
registered as "fragile and valuable," was not treated quite like
a mere bale of goods, and the Rosenheim station-master, who knew
its consignees, resolved to send it on by a passenger-train that
would leave there at daybreak. And when this train went out, in
it, among piles of luggage belonging to other travellers, to
Vienna, Prague, Buda-Pesth, Salzburg, was August, still
undiscovered, still doubled up like a mole in the winter under
the grass. Those words, "fragile and valuable," had made the men
lift Hirschvogel gently and with care. He had begun to get used
to his prison, and a little used to the incessant pounding and
jumbling and rattling and shaking with which modern travel is
always accompanied, though modern invention does deem itself so
mightily clever. All in the dark he was, and he was terribly
thirsty; but he kept feeling the earthenware sides of the
Nürnberg giant and saying, softly, "Take care of me; oh, take
care of me, dear Hirschvogel!"
He did not say, "Take me back;" for, now that he was fairly out
in the world, he wished to see a little of it. He began to think
that they must have been all over the world in all this time that
the rolling and roaring and hissing and jangling had been about
his ears; shut up in the dark, he began to remember all the tales
that had been told in Yule round the fire at his grandfather's
good house at Dorf, of gnomes and elves and subterranean terrors,
and the Erl King riding on the black horse of night, and--and--and
he began to sob and to tremble again, and this time did scream
outright. But the steam was screaming itself so loudly that no
one, had there been any one nigh, would have heard him; and in
another minute or so the train stopped with a jar and a jerk, and
he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, "München! München!"
Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart
of Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by
the Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a
black bear he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.
That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois-hunter who had
taught him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very
name of Bavaria a terror to August.
"It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!" he sobbed to the stove; but the
stove said nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no
more speak without fire than a man can see without light. Give it
fire, and it will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in
return all the sympathy you ask.
"It is Bavaria!" sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread
augury to the Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter struggles and
midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings
of jäger and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But the train
stopped; Munich was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns,
and shaking like a little aspen-leaf, felt himself once more
carried out on the shoulders of men, rolled along on a truck, and
finally set down, where he knew not, only he knew he was
thirsty,--so thirsty! If only he could have reached his hand out
and scooped up a little snow!
He thought he had been moved on this truck many miles, but in
truth the stove had been only taken from the railway-station to a
shop in the Marienplatz. Fortunately, the stove was always set
upright on its four gilded feet, an injunction to that effect
having been affixed to its written label, and on its gilded feet
it stood now in the small dark curiosity-shop of one Hans
Rhilfer.
"I shall not unpack it till Anton comes," he heard a man's voice
say; and then he heard a key grate in a lock, and by the unbroken
stillness that ensued he concluded he was alone, and ventured to
peep through the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square
room filled with pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue
jugs, old steel armor, shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna
china, Turkish rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated
rubbish of a _bric-à-brac_ dealer's. It seemed a wonderful place
to him; but, oh! was there one drop of water in it all? That was
his single thought; for his tongue was parching, and his throat
felt on fire, and his chest began to be dry and choked as with
dust. There was not a drop of water, but there was a lattice
window grated, and beyond the window was a wide stone ledge
covered with snow. August cast one look at the locked door,
darted out of his hiding-place, ran and opened the window,
crammed the snow into his mouth again and again, and then flew
back into the stove, drew the hay and straw over the place he
entered by, tied the cords, and shut the brass door down on
himself. He had brought some big icicles in with him, and by them
his thirst was finally, if only temporarily, quenched. Then he
sat still in the bottom of the stove, listening intently, wide
awake, and once more recovering his natural boldness.
[Illustration: AUGUST OPENED THE WINDOW, CRAMMED THE SNOW INTO
HIS MOUTH AGAIN AND AGAIN]
The thought of Dorothea kept nipping his heart and his conscience
with a hard squeeze now and then; but he thought to himself, "If
I can take her back Hirschvogel, then how pleased she will be,
and how little 'Gilda will clap her hands!" He was not at all
selfish in his love for Hirschvogel: he wanted it for them all at
home quite as much as for himself. There was at the bottom of his
mind a kind of ache of shame that his father--his own father--should
have stripped their hearth and sold their honor thus.
A robin had been perched upon a stone griffin sculptured on a
house-eave near. August had felt for the crumbs of his loaf in
his pocket, and had thrown them to the little bird sitting so
easily on the frozen snow.
In the darkness where he was he now heard a little song, made
faint by the stove-wall and the window-glass that was between him
and it, but still distinct and exquisitely sweet. It was the
robin, singing after feeding on the crumbs. August, as he heard,
burst into tears. He thought of Dorothea, who every morning threw
out some grain or some bread on the snow before the church. "What
use is it going _there_," she said, "if we forget the sweetest
creatures God has made?" Poor Dorothea! Poor, good, tender,
much-burdened little soul! He thought of her till his tears ran
like rain.
Yet it never once occurred to him to dream of going home.
Hirschvogel was here.