never be Hereditary Executioner nor yet handle the broadaxe on the bared necks of my fellow-men.

We went in among the dogs—great, lank, cowering, tooth-slavering brutes. I followed my father till we came to the feeding-troughs. Then he bade me to stand where I was till he should set their meat in order. So he vanished behind, the barriers. Then, when he had prepared the beasts' horrid victual, though I saw not what, he opened the narrow gate, and the howling, clambering throng broke helter-skelter for the troughs, cracking and crunching the thigh-bones, tearing at the flesh, and growling at one another till the air rang with the ear-piercing din.

And outside the little Helene flung herself frantically at the split pines of the enclosure, crying, bitterly, "Take off that hateful mantle, Hugo Gottfried! I hate it—I hate it! Take it off!"

My father stood behind the dogs, whose arched and bristling backs I could just manage to see over the fence of wooden spars, and dealt the whip judicially among them—at once as a warning to encroachers and a punishment for greed.

Then all unharmed we went out, and as soon as my father had gone up to his garret-room in the tower, I tore the red cloak off and trampled it in the dirt of the yard. Then I went and hid it in a little blind window of the tower opposite the foot of the ladder which led to my father's room. For, because of my father's anger, I dared not destroy the badge of shame altogether, as both Helene and I wished to do.

Day by day the Little Playmate (for so I was now allowed to call her—the Princesshood being mostly forgotten) grew great and tall, her fair, almost lint-white hair darkening swiftly to coppery gold with the glint of ripe wheat upon it.

Old Hanne followed her about with eyes at once wistful and doubtful. Sometimes she shook her head sadly. And I wondered if ever the poor old stumbling crone, wizened like a two-year-old winter apple, had been as light and gay a thing as our dainty rose-leaf girl.

One day I was laboring at the art of learning to write, along with Friar Laurence—a scrawny, ill-favored monk, who, for good deeds or misdeeds, I know not which, was warded in a cell opening out of the lower or garden court of the Wolfsberg, when I heard Helene dance down the stairs to the kitchen of the Red Tower.

"Hannchen!" she cried, merrily, "come and teach me that trick of the broidering needle. I never can do it but I prick myself. Nevertheless, I can fashion the Red Axe almost as clearly as the pattern, and far finer to see."

Friar Laurence raised his great, softly solid face, blue about the jowls and padded beneath the eyes with craft.

"That little maid is over much with old Hanne," he said, as if he meditated to himself; "she will teach her other prickings than the needle-play. The witch-pricking at the images of wax was what brought her here. Aye, and had it not been for your father wanting a house-keeper, the Holy Office would have burned the hag, and sent her to hell, flaming like a torch of pine knots."

Now this was the first I had heard with exactness of the matter of old Hanne's having been a witch. And now that I knew it for certain I began to imagine all sorts of unholy things about the poor wretch, and grew greatly jealous of Helene being so often in the kitchen. Whereas before I had thought nothing at all about the matter, save that Hannchen was a dull, pleasant, muttering, shuffling-footed old woman, who could make rare good cream-cakes when you got her in the humor.

And that was not often.

CHAPTER VI

DUKE CASIMIR'S FAMILIAR

I mind it was some tale of years later that I got my first glimpse below the surface of things in the town of Thorn, and especially in the castle of the Wolfsberg.

Duke Casimir continued to move, as of yore, in cavalcade through his subject city. The burghers bowed as obsequiously as ever when they could not avoid meeting him. There were the old lordly perquisitions—thunderings at iron-studded doors, battering-rams set between posts, and the clouds of dust flying from the driven lintels, the screams of maids, the crying of women, a stray corpse or two flung on to the street, and then the procession as before, arms and legs, with a mercenary soldier between each pair, fore and aft. All this was repeated and repeated, till the dull monotony of tyranny began to wear through the long Teutonic patience to the under-quick of Wendish madness.

It chanced that one night I could not sleep. It was no matter of maids that kept me awake, though by this time I was sixteen or seventeen and greatly grown—running, it is true, mostly to knees and elbows, but nevertheless long of limb and stark of bone, needing only the muscle laid on in lumps to be as strong as any.

I had begun to steal out at nights too—not on any ill errand, but that I might have the company of those about my own age—'prentice lads and the wilder sons of burghers, who had no objection to my parentage, and thought it rather a fine thing to be hand-in-glove with the son of the Red Axe of Thorn. And there we played single-stick, smite-jacket, skittles, bowls—aye, and drank deep of the city ale—the very thinnest brew that was ever passed by a bribed and muzzy ale-taster. All this was mightily pleasant to me. For so soon as they knew that I had determined to be a soldier, and not the Red Axe of the Wolfmark, they complimented me greatly on my spirit.

Well, as I lay awake and waited for the chance to slip down a rope from my bedroom window, whose foot should I hear on the turret stairs but that of my Lord Duke Casimir! My very heart quailed within me. For the fear of him sat heavy on every man and woman in the land. And as for the children—why, as far as the Baltic shore and the land of the last Ritters, mothers frightened their bairns with the Black Duke of the Wolfsberg and his Red Axe.

So now the Duke and the Red Axe were to be in conference—as indeed had happened nearly every day and night since I could remember. So that people called my father the Duke's Private Devil, his Familiar Spirit, his Evil Genius. But I knew other of it—and this night, of all nights in the year, I was to know better still.

It was a summer midnight—not like the one I told of when the story began, white with snow and glittering with the keen polish of frost. But a soft, still night, drowsy yet sleepless, with an itch of thunder tingling in the air—and, indeed, already the pulsing, uncertain glow of sheet-lightning coming and going at long intervals along the south.

I crouched and nestled in the hole in the wall where I had long ago hidden the hated red cloak, pulling my knees up uncomfortably to my chin. And great lumps of bone they were, knotted as if a smith had made them in the rough with a welding hammer and had forgotten to reduce them with the file afterwards. At that time I was thoroughly ashamed of my knees.

But no matter for them now. Duke Casimir passed in and shut the door.

"Gottfried," I heard him say, "I am a dead man!"

These words from the great Duke Casimir startled me, and though I knew well enough that Michael Texel, the Burgomeister's son, was waiting for me by the corner of the Jew's Port, I decided that, as I might never hear Duke Casimir declare his secretest soul again, I should even bide where I was; and that was in the crevice of the wall among the old clothes, which gave off such a faint, musty, sleepy smell I could scarcely keep awake.

But the Duke's next words effectually roused me.

"A dead man!" repeated Casimir. "I have not a friend in all the realm of