



Produced by Angus Christian





OTTO OF THE SILVER HAND

By Howard Pyle





CONTENTS

     I.    The Dragon's House,
     II.   How the Baron Went Forth to Shear,
     III.  How the Baron Came Home Shorn,
     IV.   The White Cross on the Hill,
     V.    How Otto Dwelt at St. Michaelsburg,
     VI.   How Otto Lived in the Dragon's House,
     VII.  The Red Cock Crows on Drachenhausen,
     VIII. In the House of the Dragon Scorner,
     IX.   How One-eyed Hans Came to Trutz-Drachen,
     X.    How Hans Brought Terror to the Kitchen,
     XI.   How Otto was Saved,
     XII.  A Ride for Life,
     XIII. How Baron Conrad Held the Bridge,
     XIV.  How Otto Saw the Great Emperor,




FOREWORD.

Between the far away past history of the world, and that which lies near
to us; in the time when the wisdom of the ancient times was dead and
had passed away, and our own days of light had not yet come, there lay a
great black gulf in human history, a gulf of ignorance, of superstition,
of cruelty, and of wickedness.

That time we call the dark or middle ages.

Few records remain to us of that dreadful period in our world's history,
and we only know of it through broken and disjointed fragments that have
been handed down to us through the generations.

Yet, though the world's life then was so wicked and black, there yet
remained a few good men and women here and there (mostly in peaceful
and quiet monasteries, far from the thunder and the glare of the worlds
bloody battle), who knew the right and the truth and lived according to
what they knew; who preserved and tenderly cared for the truths that the
dear Christ taught, and lived and died for in Palestine so long ago.

This tale that I am about to tell is of a little boy who lived and
suffered in those dark middle ages; of how he saw both the good and the
bad of men, and of how, by gentleness and love and not by strife and
hatred, he came at last to stand above other men and to 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 <DW72> 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 <DW72> 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 behind the castle stables howled dismally in
answer. Dong! Dong!--Dong! Dong!

Then would follow a great noise and uproar and hurry in the castle
court-yard below; men shouting and calling to one another, the ringing
of armor, and the clatter of horses' hoofs upon the hard stone. With the
creaking and groaning of the windlass the iron-pointed portcullis would
be slowly raised, and with a clank and rattle and clash of iron chains
the drawbridge would fall crashing. Then over it would thunder horse and
man, clattering away down the winding, stony pathway, until the great
forest would swallow them, and they would be gone.

Then for a while peace would fall upon the castle courtyard, the cock
would crow, the cook would scold a lazy maid, and Gretchen, leaning out
of a window, would sing a snatch of a song, just as though it were a
peaceful farm-house, instead of a den of robbers.

Maybe it would be evening before the men would return once more. Perhaps
one would have a bloody cloth bound about his head, perhaps one would
carry his arm in a sling; perhaps one--maybe more than one--would be
left behind, never to return again, and soon forgotten by all excepting
some poor woman who would weep silently in the loneliness of her daily
work.

Nearly always the adventurers would bring back with them pack-horses
laden with bales of goods. Sometimes, besides these, they would return
with a poor soul, his hands tied behind his back and his feet beneath
the horse's body, his fur cloak and his flat cap wofully awry. A while
he would disappear in some gloomy cell of the dungeon-keep, until an
envoy would come from the town with a fat purse, when his ransom would
be paid, the dungeon would disgorge him, and he would be allowed to go
upon his way again.

One man always rode beside Baron Conrad in his expeditions and
adventures a short, deep-chested, broad-shouldered man, with sinewy arms
so long that when he stood his hands hung nearly to his knees.

His coarse, close-clipped hair came so low upon his brow that only a
strip of forehead showed between it and his bushy, black eyebrows. One
eye was blind; the other twinkled and gleamed like a spark under the
penthouse of his brows. Many folk said that the one-eyed Hans had drunk
beer with the Hill-man, who had given him the strength of ten, for he
could bend an iron spit like a hazel twig, and could lift a barrel of
wine from the floor to his head as easily as though it were a basket of
eggs.

As for the one-eyed Hans he never said that he had not drunk beer with
the Hill-man, for he liked the credit that such reports gave him with
the other folk. And so, like a half savage mastiff, faithful to death
to his master, but to him alone, he went his sullen way and lived his
sullen life within the castle walls, half respected, half feared by the
other inmates, for it was dangerous trifling with the one-eyed Hans.




II. How the Baron went Forth to Shear.

Baron Conrad and Baroness Matilda sat together at their morning meal
below their raised seats stretched the long, heavy wooden table, loaded
with coarse food--black bread, boiled cabbage, bacon, eggs, a great
chine from a wild boar, sausages, such as we eat nowadays, and flagons
and jars of beer and wine, Along the board sat ranged in the order of
the household the followers and retainers. Four or five slatternly women
and girls served the others as they fed noisily at the table, moving
here and there behind the men with wooden or pewter dishes of food, now
and then laughing at the jests that passed or joining in the talk. A
huge fire blazed and crackled and roared in the great open fireplace,
before which were stretched two fierce, shaggy, wolfish-looking hounds.
Outside, the rain beat upon the roof or ran trickling from the eaves,
and every now and then a chill draught of wind would breathe through the
open windows of the great black dining-hall and set the fire roaring.

Along the dull-gray wall of stone hung pieces of armor, and swords and
lances, and great branching antlers of the stag. Overhead arched the
r