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 (