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. B