Otto of the Silver Hand | Page 4

be looked up to by all.
And should you follow the story to the end, I hope you may find it a
pleasure, as I have done, to ramble through those dark ancient castles,
to lie with little Otto and Brother John in the high belfry-tower, or to sit
with them in the peaceful quiet of the sunny old monastery garden, for,
of all the story, I love best those early peaceful years that little Otto
spent in the dear old White Cross on the Hill.
Poor little Otto's life was a stony and a thorny pathway, and it is well
for all of us nowadays that we walk it in fancy and not in truth.
I.
The Dragon's House.
Up from the gray rocks, rising sheer and bold and bare, stood the walls
and towers of Castle Drachenhausen. A great gate-way, with a heavy
iron-pointed portcullis hanging suspended in the dim arch above,
yawned blackly upon the bascule or falling drawbridge that spanned a
chasm between the blank stone walls and the roadway that winding
down the steep rocky slope to the little valley just beneath. There in the
lap of the hills around stood the wretched straw-thatched huts of the
peasants belonging to the castle - miserable serfs who, half timid, half
fierce, tilled their poor patches of ground, wrenching from the hard soil
barely enough to keep body and soul together. Among those vile hovels
played the little children like foxes about their dens, their wild, fierce
eyes peering out from under a mat of tangled yellow hair.
Beyond these squalid huts lay the rushing, foaming river, spanned by a
high, rude, stone bridge where the road from the castle crossed it, and
beyond the river stretched the great, black forest, within whose gloomy
depths the savage wild beasts made their lair, and where in winter time

the howling wolves coursed their flying prey across the moonlit snow
and under the net-work of the black shadows from the naked boughs
above.
The watchman in the cold, windy bartizan or watch-tower that clung to
the gray walls above the castle gateway, looked from his narrow
window, where the wind piped and hummed, across the tree-tops that
rolled in endless billows of green, over hill and over valley to the blue
and distant slope of the Keiserberg, where, on the mountain side,
glimmered far away the walls of Castle Trutz-Drachen.
Within the massive stone walls through which the gaping gateway led,
three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that even the yellow
sunlight could not light them into brightness, looked down, with row
upon row of windows, upon three sides of the bleak, stone courtyard.
Back of and above them clustered a jumble of other buildings, tower
and turret, one high-peaked roof overtopping another.
The great house in the centre was the Baron's Hall, the part to the left
was called the Roderhausen; between the two stood a huge square pile,
rising dizzily up into the clear air high above the rest - the great
Melchior Tower.
At the top clustered a jumble of buildings hanging high aloft in the
windy space a crooked wooden belfry, a tall, narrow watch- tower, and
a rude wooden house that clung partly to the roof of the great tower and
partly to the walls.
>From the chimney of this crazy hut a thin thread of smoke would now
and then rise into the air, for there were folk living far up in that empty,
airy desert, and oftentimes wild, uncouth little children were seen
playing on the edge of the dizzy height, or sitting with their bare legs
hanging down over the sheer depths, as they gazed below at what was
going on in the court-yard. There they sat, just as little children in the
town might sit upon their father's door-step; and as the sparrows might
fly around the feet of the little town children, so the circling flocks of
rooks and daws flew around the feet of these air-born creatures.

It was Schwartz Carl and his wife and little ones who lived far up there
in the Melchior Tower, for it overlooked the top of the hill behind the
castle and so down into the valley upon the further side. There, day
after day, Schwartz Carl kept watch upon the gray road that ran like a
ribbon through the valley, from the rich town of Gruenstaldt to the rich
town of Staffenburgen, where passed merchant caravans from the one
to the other - for the lord of Drachenhausen was a robber baron.
Dong! Dong! The great alarm bell would suddenly ring out from the
belfry high up upon the Melchior Tower. Dong! Dong! Till the rooks
and daws whirled clamoring and screaming. Dong! Dong! Till the
fierce wolf-hounds in the rocky kennels