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Never was I gladder of any quest than that to ride within sight of the Red Tower, and wave the blue and yellow of my master under the very ramparts of the Wolfsberg, and almost within hearing of the inhuman howling of its blood-hounds. "Singe his beard!" said my master. And with a hundred riders I did it too.
Yet he did not immediately move away, but stood awkwardly fingering his hat, as if he wished to ask a question and dared not. "It is indeed a fine place for a sound sleep," said my father, nodding his head grimly, "this same upper courtyard of the Wolfsberg. There are few that have once slept here, my noble young sir, who have ever again complained of wakefulness."
Surely I am not wanting in feeling, yet my heart was strangely chill and cold. Nevertheless, I turned and followed the procession a little way towards the walls. But even as I went, lo! the bell of the Wolfsberg slowly and brazenly clanged ten. I stopped. I had but two hours in which to visit the Little Playmate and tell her all.
Now, though the lower orders still hated my father and all that came out of the Red Tower, or indeed, for the matter of that, out of the Wolfsberg, with hardly concealed malice yet there were many in the city, specially among those of the upper classes, who began to think well of my determination to try another way of life than that to which I had been born.
The hot quadrangle of the Wolfsberg, ever smelling of horses and the swelter of shed blood, the howling, fox-colored demons in the kennels, the black Duke Casimir right gladly I forgot them all. Aye, I forgot even my father, and everything save that I was riding with two fair women through a world where all was love and spring, and where it was ever the prime of a young morning.
And it is small wonder after this, that scant and sparse were the jests played on the grim master of the Wolfsberg, or that the bay of a blood-hound tracking on the downs frightened the most stout-hearted rider in all that retinue of dare-devils. Going to the side of the Red Tower, which looked towards the court-yard, I saw the whole array come in.
But till dusk there came to our aching eyes no better evidence that the lads of Plassenburg were coming to our rescue and to the deliverance of the down-trodden city of Thorn. The soldiers of the garrison were still encamped in the great square. There was also a constant swarming and mustering of men upon the ramparts of the Wolfsberg.
He had lived so long in beautiful harmony with Bertha, and Walther's friendship had made him happy for so many years, and now both of them had been so suddenly taken from him that his life seemed at times more like a strange fairy-tale than an actual mortal existence. A knight, Hugo von Wolfsberg, became attached to the quiet, melancholy Eckbert, and seemed to cherish a genuine fondness for him.
But if the Little Playmate be as beautiful as you say, 'tis high time that she should not be left immured in the Red Tower of the Wolfsberg. True, the Duke, like a careful man, neither makes nor mells with womankind. 'Tis his only virtue. But any questing Ritterling or roaring free companion might bear her off."
I found the city seething with sullen unrest not yet openly hostile to the powers that abode in the Castle of the Wolfsberg too long cowed and down-trodden for that, but angry with the anger which one day would of a certainty break out and be pitiless.
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