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But this day the door into the Red Tower stood closed, nor would any within open for all my knocking. So perforce I had to return unsatisfied. Several times I went to the Weiss Thor to spy the horizon round for the troops of Plassenburg.
Then, with their rifles in readiness, and eyes and ears alert, they went on cautiously into the silence and gloom of the gorge. Thor had gone up the gorge at daybreak. He was stiff when he rose from the clay wallow, but a good deal of the burning and pain had gone from his wound. It still hurt him, but not as it had hurt him the preceding evening.
Skrymner, to judge by his loud snoring, fell asleep the moment he lay down upon the ground, but Thor and his comrades were not so tired as to forget that they had tasted nothing since breakfast time. Accordingly they set to work to open the wallet that Skrymner had given into their hands before closing his eyes. But it was no easy task, and with all their efforts they failed to open it.
He was overlord of these domains, and slowly his brain told him that there should be no smell which he could not comprehend, and of which he was not the master. Thor reared up slowly, until the whole nine feet of him rested on his haunches, and he sat like a trained dog, with his great forefeet, heavy with mud, drooping in front of his chest.
Now and then one of these higher movements of air would sweep gently downward and flow through the valley for a few moments in a great noiseless breath that barely stirred the tops of the balsams and spruce. One of these mountain-breaths came as Thor faced the east. And with it, faint and terrible, came the man-smell!
He watched Thor go into the house where, as he thought, death awaited him. Then in a madness for what he had done, Loki, with his head drawn down on his shoulders, started running like a bird along the ground. Grid, the old Giantess, was seated on the floor of the cave grinding corn between two stones. "Who is it?" she said, as her son led Thor within. "One of the Æsir!
As it was, Thor disappeared slowly in the direction from which he had come, his great head hung low, his long claws click, click, clicking like ivory castanets as he went. Not until then did it seem to Langdon that he breathed again, and that his heart resumed its beating. He gave a great sobbing gasp. He rose to his feet, and his legs seemed weak.
Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come.
Perhaps man is the finest of all God's creations, but when it comes to his respect for old age he is no better, and sometimes not as good, as a grizzly bear; for Thor would not rob an old bear, he would not fight an old bear, and he would not drive an old bear from his own meat which is more than can be said of some humans. And the visitor was an old bear, and a sick bear as well.
Scarcely were they out of the room, when the faint had deepened into death; and Friedrich Wilhelm, at rest from all his labors, slept with the primeval sons of Thor. No Baresark of them, nor Odin's self, I think, was a bit of truer human stuff; I confess his value to me, in these sad times, is rare and great.
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