inde looked at him, and her emerald eyes held a steely
glitter in their depths.

"I am neither judge nor"--I think she was going to say "executioner," but
she remembered in time and for my sake was silent, which I thought was
both gracious and charming of her. She resumed in a softer tone: "What
sentence, then, would you desire, thus confessing your guilt?"

"That I might end myself over the cliff there!" said the innkeeper,
pointing to the wall of rock along the edge of which we were riding.

"See, then, that he is well ended!" said the Princess, briefly, to
Jorian.

"Good!" said Jorian, saluting.

And very coolly betook himself to the edge of the cliff, where he primed
his piece anew, and blew up his match.

"Loose the man and stand back!" cried the Princess.

A moment the innkeeper stood nerving himself. A moment he hung on the
thin edge of his resolve. The slack gray face worked convulsively, the
white lips moved, the hands were gripped close to his sides as though
to run a race. His whole body seemed suddenly to shrink and fall in
upon itself.

"The torture! The terrible torture!" he shrieked aloud, and ran swiftly
from the clutches of the men who had held him. Between the path and the
verge of the cliff from which he was suffered to cast himself there
stretched some thirty or forty yards of fine green turf. The old man ran
as though at a village fair for some wager of slippery pig's tail, but
all the time the face of him was like Death and Hell following after.

At the cliff's edge he leaped high into the air, and went headlong down,
to our watching eyes as slowly as if he had sunk through water. None of
us who were on the path saw more of him. But Jorian craned over,
regarding the man's end calmly and even critically. And when he had
satisfied himself that that which was done was properly done, as coolly
as before he stowed away his match in his cover-fire, mounted his horse,
and rode towards us.

He nodded to the Princess. "Good, my Lady!" quoth he, for all comment.

"I saved a charge that time!" said he to his companion.

"Good!" quoth Boris, in his turn.

We had now a safe and noble escort, and the way to Plassenburg was easy.
The face of the country gradually changed. No more was it the gray,
wistful plain of the Wolfmark, upon which our Red Tower looked down. No
more did we ride through the marly, dusty, parched lands, in which were
the ravines with their uncanny cavern villages, of which this