CHAPTER I

THE RED AXE

By S.R. Crockett

1900

CONTENTS

I. DUKE CASIMIR RIDES LATE

II. THE LITTLE PLAYMATE COMES HOME

III. THE RED AXE OF THE WOLFMARK

IV. THE PRINCESS HELENE

V. THE BLOOD-HOUNDS ARE FED

VI. DUKE CASIMIR'S FAMILIAR

VII. I BECOME A TRAITOR

VIII. AT THE BAR OF THE WHITE WOLF

IX. A HERO CARRIES WATER IN THE SUN

X. THE LUBBER FIEND

XI. THE VISION IN THE CRYSTAL

XII. EYES OF EMERALD

XIII. CHRISTIAN'S ELSA

XIV. SIR AMOROUS IS PLEASED WITH HIMSELF

XV. THE LITTLE PLAYMATE SETTLES ACCOUNTS

XVI. TWO WOMEN--AND A MAN

XVII. THE RED AXE IS LEFT ALONE

XVIII. THE PRIME OF THE MORNING

XIX. WENDISH WIT

XX. THE EARTH-DWELLERS OF NO MAN'S LAND

XXI. I STAND SENTRY

XXII. HELENE HATES ME

XXIII. HUGO OF THE BROADAXE

XXIV. THE SORTIE

XXV. MINE HOST RUNS HIS LAST RACE

XXVI. PRINCE JEHU MILLER'S SON

XXVII. ANOTHER MAN'S COAT

XXVIII. THE PRINCE'S COMPACT

XXIX. LOVES ME--LOVES ME NOT

XXX. INSULT AND CHALLENGE

XXXI. I FIND A SECOND

XXXII. THE WOLVES OF THE MARK

XXXIII. THE FLIGHT OF THE LITTLE PLAYMATE

XXXIV. THE GOLDEN NECKLACE

XXXV. THE DECENT SERVITOR

XXXVI. YSOLINDE'S FAREWELL

XXXVII. CAPTAIN KARL MILLER'S SON

XXXVIII. THE BLACK RIDERS

XXXIX. THE FLAG ON THE RED TOWER

XL. THE TRIAL OF THE WITCH

XLI. THE GARRET OF THE RED TOWER

XLII. PRINCESS PLAYMATE

XLIII. THE TRIAL FOR WITCHCRAFT

XLIV. SENTENCE OF DEATH

XLV. THE MESSAGE FROM THE WHITE GATE

XLVI. A WOMAN SCORNED

XLVII. THE RED AXE DIES STANDING UP

XLVIII. HUGO GOTTFRIED, RED AXE OF THE WOLFMARK

XLIX. THE SERPENT'S STRIFE

L. THE DUNGEON OF THE WOLFSBERG

LI. THE NIGHT BEFORE THE MORN

LII. THE HEADSMAN'S RIGHT

LIII. THE LUBBER FIEND'S RETURN

LIV. THE CROWNING OF DUKE OTHO

LV. THE LADY YSOLINDE SAVES HER SOUL

LVI. HELENA, PRINCESS OF PLASSENBURG

THE RED AXE

CHAPTER I

DUKE CASIMIR RIDES LATE

Well do I, Hugo Gottfried, remember the night of snow and moonlight when

first they brought the Little Playmate home. I had been sleeping--a

sturdy, well-grown fellow I, ten years or so as to my age--in a stomacher

of blanket and a bed-gown my mother had made me before she died at the

beginning of the cold weather. Suddenly something awoke me out of my

sleep. So, all in the sharp chill of the night, I got out of my bed,

sitting on the edge with my legs dangling, and looked curiously at the

bright streams of moonlight which crossed the wooden floor of my garret.

I thought if only I could swim straight up one of them, as the motes did

in the sunshine, I should be sure to come in time to the place where my

mother was--the place where all the pretty white things came from--the

sunshine, the moonshine, the starshine, and the snow.

And there would be children to play with up there--hundreds of children

like myself, and all close at hand. I should not any longer have to sit

up aloft in the Red Tower with none to speak to me--all alone on the top

of a wall--just because I had a crimson patch sewn on my blue-corded

blouse, on my little white shirt, embroidered in red wool on each of my

warm winter wristlets, and staring out from the front of both my

stockings. It was a pretty enough pattern, too. Yet whenever one of the

children I so much longed to play with down on the paved roadway beneath

our tower caught sight of it he rose instantly out of the dust and hurled

oaths and ill-words at me--aye, and oftentimes other missiles that hurt

even worse--at a little lonely boy who was breaking his heart with loving

him up there on the tower.

"Come down and be killed, foul brood of the Red Axe!" the children cried.

And with that they ran as near as they dared, and spat on the wall of our

house, or at least on the little wooden panel which opened inward in the

great trebly spiked iron door of the Duke's court-yard.

But this night of the first home-coming of the Little Playmate I awoke

crying and fearful in the dead vast of the night, when all the other

children who would not speak to me were asleep. Then pulling on my

comfortable shoes of woollen list (for my father gave me all things to

make me warm, thinking me delicate of body), and drawing the many-patched

coverlet of the bed about me, I clambered up the stone stairway to the

very top of the tower in which I slept. The moon was broad, like one of

the shields in the great hall, whither I went often when the great Duke

was not at home, and when old Hanne would be busy cleaning the pavement

and scrubbing viciously at the armor of the iron knights who stood on

pedestals round about.

"One day I shall be a man-at-arms, too," I said once to Hanne, "and ride

a-foraying with Duke Ironteeth."

But old Hanne only shook her head and answered:

"Ill foraying shalt thou make, little shrimp. Such work as thine is not

done on horseback--keep wide from me, _toadchen_, touch me not!"

For even old Hanne flouted me and would not let me approach her too

closely, all because once I had asked her what my father did to witches,

and if she were a witch that she crossed herself and trembled whenever

she passed him in the court-yard.

Now, having little else to do, I loved to look down from the top of the

tower at all times. But never more so than when there was snow on the

ground, for then the City of Thorn lay apparent beneath me, all spread

out like a painted picture, with its white and red roofs and white houses

bright in the moonlight--so near that it seemed as though I could pat

every child lying asleep in its little bed, and scrape away the snow with

my fingers from every red tile off which the house-fires had not already

melted it.

The town of Thorn was the chief place of arms, and high capital city of

all the Wolfmark. It was a thriving place, too, humming with burghers and

trades and guilds, when our great Duke Casimir would let them alone;

perilous, often also, with pikes and discontents when he swooped from the

tall over-frowning Castle of the Wolfsberg upon their booths and

guilderies--"to scotch the pride of rascaldom," as he told them when they

complained. In these days my father was little at home, his business

keeping him abroad all the day about the castle-yard, at secret

examinations in the Hall of Judgment, or in mysterious vaults in the

deepest parts of the castle, where the walls are eighteen feet thick, and

from which not a groan can penetrate to the outside while the Duke

Casimir's judgment was being done upon the poor bodies and souls of men

and women his prisoners.

In the court-yard, too, the dogs, fierce russet-tan blood-hounds,

ravined for their fearsome food. And in these days there was plenty of

it, too, so that they were yelling and clamoring all day, and most of

the night, for that which it made me sweat to think of. And beneath the

rebellious city cowered and muttered, while the burghers and their

wives shivered in their beds as the howling of Duke Casimir's

blood-hounds came fitfully down the wind, and Duke Casimir's guards

clashed arms under their windows.

So this night I looked down contentedly enough from my perched eyrie on

the top of the Red Tower. It had been snowing a little earlier in the

evening, and the brief blast had swept the sky clean, so that even the

brightest stars seemed sunken and waterlogged in the white floods of

moonlight. Under my hand lay the city. Even the feet of the watch made no

clatter on the pavements. The fresh-fallen snow masked the sound. The

kennels of the blood-hounds were silent, for their dreadful tenants were

abroad that night on the Duke's work.

Yet, sitting up there on the Wolfsberg, it seemed to me that I could

distinguish a muttering as of voices full of hate, like men talking low

on their beds the secret things of evil and treason. I discerned

discontent and rebellion rumbling and brooding over the city that clear,

keen night of early winter.

Then, when after a while I turned from the crowded roofs and looked down

upon the gray, far-spreading plain of the Wolfmark, to the east I saw

that which appeared like winking sparks of light moving among the black

clumps of copse and woodland which fringed the river. These wimpled and

scattered, and presently grew brighter. A long howl, like that of a

lonely wolf on the waste when he calls to his kindred to tell him their

where-abouts, came faintly up to my ears.

A hound gave tongue responsively among the heaped mews and doggeries

beneath the ramparts. Lights shone in windows athwart the city. Red

nightcaps were thrust out of hastily opened casements. The Duke's

standing guard clamored with their spear-butts on the uneven pavements,

crying up and down the streets: "To your kennels, devil's brats, Duke

Casimir comes riding home!"

Then I tell you my small heart beat furiously. For I knew that if I

only kept quiet I should see that which I had never yet seen--the

home-coming of our famous foraying Duke. I had, indeed, seen Duke

Casimir often enough in the castle, or striding across the court-yard

to speak to my father, for whom he had ever a remarkable affection. He

was a tall, swart, black-a-vised man, with a huge hairy mole on his

cheek, and long dog-teeth which showed at the sides of his mouth when

he smiled, almost as pleasantly as those of a she-wolf looking out of

her den at the hunters.

But I had never seen the Duke of all the Wolfmark come riding home ere

daybreak, laden with the plunder of captured castles and the rout of

deforced cities. For at such times my father would carefully lock the

door on me, and confine me to my little sleeping-chamber--from whence I

could see nothing but the square of smooth pavement on which the

children chalked their games, and from which they cried naughtily up at

me, the poor hermit of the Red Tower. But this night my father would be

with the Duke, and I should see all. For high or low there was none in

the empty Red Tower to hinder or forbid.

As I waited, thrilling with expectation, I heard beneath me the

quickening pulse-beat of the town. The watch hurried here and there,

hectoring, threatening, and commanding. But, in spite of all, men

gathered as soon as their backs were turned in the alleys and street

openings. Clusters of heads showed black for a moment in some darksome

entry, cried "U-g-g-hh!" with a hateful sound, and vanished ere the

steel-clad veterans of the Duke's guard could come upon them. It was like

the hide-and-seek which I used to play with Boldo, my blood-hound puppy,

among the dusty waste of the lumber-room over the Hall of Judgment,

before my father took him back to the kennels for biting Christian's

Elsa, a child who lived in the lower Guard opposite to the Red Tower.

But this was a stranger hide-and-seek than mine and Boldo's had been. For

I saw one of the men who cried hatefully to the guard stumble on the

slippery ice; and lo! or ever he had time to cry out or gather himself

up, the men-at-arms were upon him. I saw the glitter of stabbing steel

and heard the sickening sound of blows stricken silently in anger. Then

the soldiers took the man up by head and heels carelessly, jesting as

they went. And I shuddered, for I knew that they were bringing him to the

horrible long sheds by the Red Tower through which the wind whistled. But

in the moonlight the patch which was left on the snow was black, not red.

After this the crooked alleys were kept clearer, and I could see down the

long High Street of Thorn right to the Weiss Thor and the snow-whitened

pinnacles of the Palace, out of which Duke Casimir had for the time being

frightened Bishop Peter. Black stood the Gate Port against the moonlight

and the snow when I first looked at it. A moment after it had opened, and

a hundred lights came crowding through, like sheep through an entry on

their way to the shambles--which doubtless is their Hall of Judgment,

where there waits for them the Red Axe of a lowlier degree.

The lights, I say, came thronging through the gate. For though it was

moonlight, the Duke Casimir loved to come home amid the red flame of

torches, the trail of bituminous reek, and with a dashing train of riders

clattering up to the Wolfsberg behind him, through the streets of Thorn,

lying black and cowed under the shadows of its thousand gables.

So the procession undulated towards me, turbid and tumultuous. First a

reckless pour of riders urging wearied horses, their sides white-flecked

above with blown foam, and dark beneath with rowelled blood. Many of the

horsemen carried marks upon them which showed that all had not been

plunder and pleasuring upon their foray. For there were white napkins,

and napkins that had once been white, tied across many brows. Helmets

swung clanking like iron pipkins from saddle-bows, and men rode wearily

with their arms in slings, drooping haggard faces upon their chests. But

all passed rapidly enough up the steep street, and tumbled with noise and

shouting, helter-skelter into the great court-yard beneath me as I

watched, secure as God in heaven, from my perch on the Red Tower.

Then came the captives, some riding horses bare-backed, or held in place

before black-bearded riders--women mostly these last, with faces

white-set and strange of eye, or all beblubbered with weeping. Then came

a man or two also on horseback, old and reverend. After them a draggled

rabble of lads and half-grown girls, bound together with ropes and kept

at a dog's trot by the pricking spears of the men-at-arms behind, who

thought it a jest to sink a spear point-deep in the flesh of a man's

back--"drawing the claret wine" they called it. For these riders of Duke

Casimir were every one jolly companions, and must have their merry jest.

After the captives had gone past--and sorry I was for them--the

body-guard of Duke Casimir came riding steadily and gallantly, all

gentlemen of the Mark, with their sons and squires, landed men, towered

men, free Junkers, serving the Duke for loyalty and not servitude, though

ever "living by the saddle"--as, indeed, most of the Ritterdom and gentry

of the Mark had done for generations.

Then behind them came Duke Casimir himself. The Eastland blood he had

acquired from his Polish mother showed as he rode gloomily apart,

thoughtful, solitary, behind the squared shoulders of his knights. After

him another squadron of riders in ghastly armor of black-and-white, with

torches in their hand and grinning skulls upon their shields, closed in

the array. The great gate of the Wolfsberg was open now, and, leaving

behind him the hushed and darkened town, the master rode into his castle.

The Wolf was in his lair. But in the streets many a burgher's wife

trembled on her bed, while her goodman peered cautiously over the leads

by the side of a gargoyle, and fancied that already he heard the clamor

of the partisans thundering at his door with the Duke's invitation to

meet him in the Hall of Judgment.