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But I hope no one will go back to the Wolfmark and tell the maids that Hugo Gottfried said this of them, or of a surety my left ear will tingle with the running of their tongues if there be any truth in the old saw. It was three of the clock and the sun was very fierce on the dusty, unslaked yard of the Wolfsberg, glaring down upon us like the mouth of a wide smelter's oven.
"We, the Court of the Wolfmark, find the prisoner, Helene, called Gottfried, guilty of witchcraft, and especially of compassing and causing the death of our predecessor, the most noble Duke Casimir, and we do hereby adjudge that, on the morning of Sunday presently following, Helene Gottfried shall be executed upon the common scaffold by the axe of the executioner.
Presently the voices lowered, and I knew also that the Duke Casimir was unbending as he did to none else in his realm save to the Hereditary Justicer of the Wolfmark. But I had my hands full with the little Princess. I dared not go down the stairs. I dared not for a moment take my palm off her mouth.
"We were long in riding over to Thorn two days and nights upon the way. It was a terrible time, and all the while those condemned beasts of the Wolfmark, Casimir's Black Riders, driving us with their spears like prick-goads, till our backs were all bleeding, gentle and simple alike. So at midnight of the third day we came to the city of Thorn, and up through the streets to the Wolfsberg.
"Not wish to be Hereditary Executioner? Why, are you not a Gottfried, the only son of a Gottfried, the only son of his father, who also was a Gottfried and Hereditary Red Axe of the Wolfmark?
Otho von Reuss, now Duke of the Wolfmark, was standing erect by the great chair in which, as my father had so often described him to me, Casimir had sat so many days with his head sunk on his breast. The new Duke stood up proudly, gazing at us with frowning brows and lowering, narrowed eyes.
An officer of the Black Hussars, fantastically dressed in their church-yard array, with skull and cross-bones slashed in silver across his breast, accosted me. "Hugo Gottfried, son of Gottfried Gottfried, in the name of the Duke Otho and the State of the Wolfmark, I arrest you! Also you, Leopold von Dessauer, Chancellor of the Princedom of Plassenburg.
But, after all, you spoke as became a Gottfried, and one day, I doubt not, you shall worthily learn the secrets, bear the burden, and enlarge the honors of the fourteen Red Axes of the Wolfmark." With all which adventuring and bepraisement back and forth, as those who know nineteen will readily be assured, I went home no little elated.
And whereas these street-corner scraps of rascaldom care for nothing but the pleasing of pothouse Gretchens, we that are men think of the concerns of the State, and make us ready for the great things that shall one day come to pass in Thorn and the Wolfmark." I nodded my head as if I knew all about it.
But ere the Red Axe could fall there arose a wild scream from the Duke's enclosure. Some one cried, "Let me go! He has said it! He has said it! I will not be silent any longer!" It was the Lady Ysolinde, who had broken away from her father's hand. "The girl is his wife," she went on. "He has claimed her according to the laws of the Wolfmark, that cannot be broken, he has called her his wife.
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