The Red Axe

Then began my father to tell the story slowly, with many a pause and interruption, now searching for words, now racked with pain, all of which I need not imitate, and shall leav...

And now I must see the Little Playmate. Judge ye whether or no my heart was torn in twain as I went up the long High Street of Thorn, back to the Wolfsberg, alone. For I had com...

At nine I was at the door of the dark, silent house by the Weiss Thor. I sounded the knocker loudly, and with the end of the reverberations I heard a foot come through the long...

"You mocked at their terrors, did you not, and told them that you, who had seen the teeth of the Duke's hounds, had nothing to fear from the bare gums of the White Wolf?"

Now how this plan of my Lord Prince's worked in the Palace of Plassenburg I find it difficult to tell without writing myself down a "painted flittermouse," as the Prince express...

It was a strange little room into which the Lady Ysolinde brought me, full of quaint, changeful scents, and all ablaze with colors the like of which I had never seen. For not on...

"'Tis scarcely an hour to sunrise," he continued, "and I warrant the noble Red Axe will desire to feel the edge of his tool and see that his assistants are in their places."

The Hirschgasse is a little inn across the river, well known to the wilder blades of Plassenburg. There they go to be outside the authority of the city magistrates, to make rend...

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 yea...

With all which adventuring and bepraisement back and forth, as those who know nineteen will readily be assured, I went home no little elated. For had I not come without dishonor...

It took us all our powers of persuasion with the Prince to induce him to depart homeward on the morrow, under escort of a dozen sturdy and well-armed lanzknechte attached to the...

I meant to go directly to the Prince in his chamber and tell him that from this time forth Helene and I had resolved to battle out our lives together. But it chanced that I pass...

I could hear the thrill of interest which pervaded the assembly at the announcement. And for the first time I thought almost well of the honorable office to which I had been born.

At five of the clock I lifted the great wolf's-head knocker of shining brass which frowned above the door of Master Gerard von Sturm in the port of the Weiss Thor. Hardly had I...

I mind it was some tale of years later that I got my first glimpse below the surface of things in the town of Thorn, and especially in the castle of the Wolfsberg.

How I stumbled down the stairs and found myself outside the house in the Weiss Thor I do not know. Whether the servitor, Sir Respectable, showed me out or not has quite passed f...

The Bed of Justice was set by eight of the morning. For they were ever early astir in the city of Thorn, though, like most early risers, they did little enough afterwards all day.

For, as I say, women have curious ways, and there are a good many of them recorded in this book. And yet more I have observed which I cannot find room for in a chronicle of so m...

Much was I flattered, and very naturally so, when Michael Texel made so manifest a work about pleasing me and having me for his comrade. For though I was now nineteen, he was fi...

"Do not be afraid, mannie," she said, laying down the axe on the stock of the couch, against which its broad red blade and glass-clear cutting edge made an irregular patch of li...

I followed the Prince without another word, and when he received the Princess I had the happiness of taking the Little Playmate by the hand and conducting her as gallantly as I...

But at long and last the most tardy-footed day comes to an end. And so, just as fast as on any common day, the sun at last dropped to the edge of the horizon and slowly sank, le...

I thought that, on the whole, pretty well; but, looking up at Helene, I saw that her smile (so different from that of the Io-Cow Katrin) had become a whole volume of scathing sa...

Black, blank, chill, confining night shut us in as Leopold Dessauer and I rode out of Plassenburg. Our horses had been made ready for us at the little water-gate in the lower ga...

"Haste you, lad; there are men coming across the yard with torches. They are gathering in groups about the door. Now they are on the stairs--many soldiers--and with weapons in t...

In spite of all drawbacks and difficulties (and I had my share of them) I loved Plassenburg. And especially I loved the Prince. The son, so they said, of a miller in the valley...

Yet now, when she was in her own country, and as good as any queen thereof, I found the Lady Ysolinde in no wise different from, what she had been in the city of Thorn and in he...

Just as clearly do I remember the next morning. The Little Playmate lay by me on my bed, wrapped in one of my childish night-gowns--which old Hanne had sought out for her the ni...

Now so strange a thing is woman that, so soon as we were started down the High Street of the city of Thorn, the Little Playmate dried her eyes, turned towards me in her saddle,...

But the Princess-Playmate spoke to me again. I was even permitted to call her Helene. Me she addressed uniformly as "Hugo Gottfried." But neither her name nor mine interfered wi...

There are (say some) but two things worth the trouble of making in the world--war and love. So once upon a time I believed. But since--being laid up during the unkindly monotony...

However, when the provision came to the outer port, we three sat down about it, and then, by my troth, there was little to marvel at in the tardiness of our eating. For the rabb...

But as for me, sleep I could not. And indeed that is small wonder. For it was the first night I had ever slept out of the Red Tower in my life. I seemed to lack some necessary a...

I felt my temples, my ears, my neck tingling with cold. I seemed to have fallen into a sea of ice. I think I would have fallen and fainted but that at that moment my master sat...

The next day we jogged along, and many were our advices and admonitions to the Prince to return. For we were now on the borders of his kingdom, and from indications which met us...

It was the forenoon of a Sunday, a dull, sleepy time in all countries, and one difficult to get overpast. I was as usual busy with my accoutrement, recently bought with the loan...

There was, however, deadly work yet before the men of Plassenburg. We found, indeed, that the townsfolk were with us almost to a man. Their guild train-bands gathered and muster...

Now, because there is still so much to tell, and so little time and space to tell it in, I must go forward rapidly. In these dull times of grouting peace, when men become like p...

But there was to be no Session in the Hall of Judgment that night. The great court-yard, roofed with the vault of stars and lit by the moon, was to see all done that remained to...

Hearty were the greetings when the soldiers found us all safe and sound. They shook us again and again by the hand. They clapped us on the back. They examined professionally the...

The gray plain of the Wolfmark, which we had been traversing ever since we descended out of the steep Weiss Thor of the city of Thorn, had now begun to break into ridges and mou...

The door was open, and the next I mind was my axe whirling about my head and Jorian rushing out of the other door a step ahead of me, with his broadsword in his hand. I cannot t...

Gottfried Gottfried bowed to the guest of his house with the noble manner which comes to every serious-minded man who deals habitually in the high matters of life and death. I m...

Then presently we came to a strange place, the like of which I have never seen, save here on the borders of the Mark and the northern Wendish lands. An amalgam of lime, or bindi...

It was about this time, and after we had made our quarrel up, that Helene began to call me "Great Brother." After all, there is manifest virtue in a name, and the Little Playmat...

The next morning early, as I went about making my dispositions, and putting men of trust in positions fit for them--for the Prince has given me the command of all the soldiers w...

"The Bishop," he said, "is gone forth of his house. He is in attendance at the trial of a woman for witchcraft, one whom some of the common city folk hold to be a saint. But the...

We sat in a kind of buzzing hush, on the low window-seat of the old room, hand in hand. The shouts of the people came up to us from the square beneath. We heard the tramp of the...

I rushed out into the street, distract and insensate with grief and madness. I found the city seething with sullen unrest--not yet openly hostile to the powers that abode in the...

Even as the dwarf on the ledge of the castle clocktower creaked his wires and clicked back his hammer to strike the midnight over the city, even as the first solemn toll of the...

"I am a stranger, most noble Duke," he began, "and as such have no standing in this your High Court of Justice. But there is a certain courtesy extended to doctors of the law--t...

"This grows past all bearing," cried the Prince one morning, when he had summoned into his hall the Chancellor Dessauer and myself. For, though the Prince was still wont to comm...

Dazed and death-stricken by the horror of the choice which lay before me, I hastened down the street, hardly waiting for Dessauer, who toiled vainly after me. I knew not what to...

We carried Dessauer back to the boat with the utmost tenderness, the Prince walking by his side, and oft-times taking his hand. I followed behind them, more than a little sad to...

The Chancellor Leopold von Dessauer, High Councillor of the Prince, with his head still bound up, was pacing the sparred gallery outside the private apartments of his master. It...

The Duke's body sank down upon that of the soldier, still further blocking the passage. And as for his head, I know not where that went to. But the rush of his followers was utt...