Going to the side of the Red Tower, which looked towards the court-yard, I saw the whole array come in.  I watched the prisoners unceremoniously dismounted and huddled together against the coming of the Duke.  There was but one man among them who stood erect.  The torch-light played on his face, which was sometimes bent down to a little child in his arms, so that I saw him well.  He looked not at all upon the rude men-at-arms who pushed and bullied about him, but continued tenderly to hush his charge, as if he had been a nurse in a babe-chamber under the leads, with silence in all the house below.

It pleased me to see the man, for all my life I had loved children.  And yet at ten years of age I had never so much as touched one—­no, nor spoken even, only looked down on those that hated me and spat on the very tower wherein I dwelt.  But nevertheless I loved them and yearned to tell them so, even when they mocked me.  So I watched this little one in the man’s arms.

Then came the Duke along the line, and behind him, like the Shadow of Death, paced my father Gottfried Gottfried, habited all in red from neck to heel, and carrying for his badge of office as Hereditary Justicer to the Dukes of the Wolfmark that famous red-handled, red-bladed axe, the gleaming white of whose deadly edge had never been wet save with the blood of men and women.

The guard pushed the captives rudely into line as the Duke Casimir strode along the front.  The women he passed without a sign or so much as a look.  They were kept for another day.  But the men were judged sharp and sudden, as the Duke in his black armor passed along, and that scarlet Shadow of Death with the broad axe over his shoulder paced noiselessly behind him.

For as each man looked into the eyes of Casimir of the Wolfsberg he read his doom.  The Duke turned his wrist sharply down, whereupon the attendant sprites of the Red Shadow seized the man and rent his garment down from his neck—­or the hand pointed up, and then the man set his hand to his heart and threw his head back in a long sigh of relief.

It came the turn of the man who carried the babe.

Duke Casimir paused before him, scowling gloomily at him.

“Ha, Lord Prince of so great a province, you will not set yourself up any more haughtily.  You will quibble no longer concerning tithes and tolls with Casimir of the Wolfmark.”

And the Duke lifted his hand and smote the man on the cheek with his open hand.

Yet the captive only hushed the child that wailed aloud to see her guardian smitten.

He looked Duke Casimir steadfastly in the eyes and spoke no word.

“Great God, man, have you nothing to say to me ere you die?” cried Duke Casimir, choked with hot, sudden anger to be so crossed.

The elder man gazed steadily at his captor.

“God will judge betwixt me, a man about to die, and you, Casimir of the Wolfmark,” he said at last, very slowly—­“by the eyes of this little maid He will judge!”