solate, the mountains rose above rugged
heaps of boulders, and it often looked as if the road ended abruptly,
closed by a great stone door. But just as on the previous day they had
met large numbers of wagons, pedestrians and muleteers, so here too
they met people, teams and animals. All at once the gray rocks
separated, and they reached a wide spreading mountain meadow. The road
led between two small, still, dark mountain lakes, to three massive but
unhomelike looking buildings. This was the hospice among the Italian
Alps.

Chapter VII

Stephen Fausch: stood once more at the anvil as at Waltheim, and his
workshop was even blacker and gloomier than the one in the woods. It
had a single blind window, but a huge door. The house was built of
great blocks of granite, with the workshop in the lower part, and the
superstructure projected far out over the workshop door, and was
supported on wooden pillars, so that a sort of large, covered portico
resulted. The sun never made its way into the dark room, but that did
not trouble Stephen Fausch. He would have been somewhat out of place in
a more cheerful workshop.

This large building was the oldest of the hospice buildings. Formerly
the monks had lived here and had for many years kept the travelers'
shelter in the mountain pass. The traffic over the long Alpine road was
now increasing from year to year. Simmen, the landlord of the hospice,
had been for the past ten years managing the new tavern, which stood
opposite to the old shelter, and he had at this time become a man of
substance.

Stephen Fausch, whose hammer was ringing through the stillness of a
cloudless morning, the second since his arrival at the hospice, was
just as he had always been. He was wearing his stiff, greasy leather
apron, a dirty shirt, and fresh coal dust had already settled in his
tangled curly hair.

"Lord!" laughed the stout landlord, Simmen, who was leaning against one
of the wooden pillars and looking into the workshop, "Hallheimer had no
eye for beauty, when he sent you to us."

"You must have forgotten to put it in the contract, that a man must be
handsome if he wants your blacksmith shop," said Fausch; but he laughed
too--an odd, contented laugh--and stepped outside to Simmen. In some
way the two men liked each other, perhaps because each one saw in the
other that he had been accustomed to hard work and that his life
depended upon it.

Simmen was in his sp