nded the only road across the mountain; therefore, did command the
situation. The emperor and the king should be but the wooden figures,
and I would pull the strings to make them dance. The duke, your
master, why should he be more than a name? The princess' letter told
me she had never seen her betrothed. What easier than to redouble the
sentries in the valley, make prisoners of the messengers, clap them in
the fortress dungeons, read the missives, and then despatch them to
their respective destinations by men of my own?"

"Then that was the reason why on my way through the mountains your
knaves attacked me?" said the listener quickly.

"Exactly; to search you. How you slipped through their hands I know
not." And he glanced at the other curiously.

"They were but poor rogues," answered the jester quickly.

"Certainly are you not one!" exclaimed the free baron, with a glance of
approval at the slender figure of his antagonist. "Two of them paid
for their carelessness. The others were so shamed, they told me some
great knight had attacked them. A fool in motley!" he laughed. "No
wonder the rogues hung their heads! But in deceiving me," he added
thoughtfully, "they permitted their master to run into an unknown
peril--his ignorance that a fool of the duke, or a fool wearing the
emblem of the emperor, had gone to Francis' court."

"You were saying, Sir Free Baron, you intended to read the messages
between the princess and the duke, and afterward to despatch them by
messengers of your own?" interrupted the _plaisant_.

"Such were my plans. Moreover, I possessed a clerk--a knave who had
killed an abbot and fled from the monastery--a man of poetry, wit and
sentiment. Whenever the letters lacked for ardor, and the lovers had
grown too timid, him I set to forge a postscript, or indite new
missives, which the rogue did most prettily, having studied love-making
under the monks. And thus, Sir Fool, I courted and won the
princess--by proxy!"

"Of a certainty, your wooing was at least novel, Sir Knight of the
Vulture's Nest," dryly observed the jester. "Although, had my master
known the deception, you would, perhaps, have paid dearly for it."

"Your master, forsooth!" laughed the outlaw lord. "A puny scion of a
worn-out ancestry! Such a woman as the princess wants a man of brawn
and muscle; no weakling of the nursery."

"Well," said the fool, slowly, "you became intermediary between the
princess and the duke