room had been preserved
from further harm. No spider web was to be seen, no trace of nibbling
mice, not even a dead moth or fly on the sills of the diamond-paned
windows; life seemed to have shunned the room utterly and finally.

The men looked at the room curiously, and, I am sure, not without some
feelings of awe and unacknowledged fear; but, whatever they may have
felt of instinctive shrinking, they said nothing, and quickly set to
work to make the room passably inhabitable. They decided to touch
nothing that had not absolutely to be changed, and therefore they made
for themselves a bed in one corner with the mattress and linen from the
inn. In the great fireplace they piled a lot of wood on the caked ashes
of a fire dead for forty years, turned the old chest into a table, and
laid out on it all their arrangements for the evening's amusement: food,
two or three bottles of wine, pipes and tobacco, and the chess-board
that was their inseparable travelling companion.

All this they did themselves: the innkeeper would not even come within
the walls of the outer court; he insisted that he had washed his hands
of the whole affair, the silly dunderheads might go to their death their
own way. _He_ would not aid and abet them. One of the stable boys
brought the basket of food and the wood and the bed up the winding stone
stairs, to be sure, but neither money nor prayers nor threats would
bring him within the walls of the accursed place, and he stared
fearfully at the hare-brained boys as they worked around the dead old
room preparing for the night that was coming so fast.

At length everything was in readiness, and after a final visit to the
inn for dinner Rupert and Otto started at sunset for the Keep. Half the
village went with them, for Peter Rosskopf had babbled the whole story
to an open-mouthed crowd of wondering men and women, and as to an
execution the awe-struck crowd followed the two boys dumbly, curious to
see if they surely would put their plan into execution. But none went
farther than the outer doorway of the stairs, for it was already growing
twilight. In absolute silence they watched the two foolhardy youths with
their lives in their hands enter the terrible Keep, standing like a
tower in the midst of the piles of stones that had once formed walls
joining it with the mass of the castle beyond. When a moment later a
light showed itself in the high windows above, they sighed resignedly
and went their ways, to