CHAPTER VI.
DUKE CASIMIR'S FAMILIAR I mind it was some tale of years later that I got my first glimpse below the surface of things in the town of Thorn, and especially in the castle of the Wolfsberg.
Duke Casimir continued to move, as of yore, in cavalcade through his subject city.

The burghers bowed as obsequiously as ever when they could not avoid meeting him.

There were the old lordly perquisitions--thunderings at iron-studded doors, battering-rams set between posts, and the clouds of dust flying from the driven lintels, the screams of maids, the crying of women, a stray corpse or two flung on to the street, and then the procession as before, arms and legs, with a mercenary soldier between each pair, fore and aft.

All this was repeated and repeated, till the dull monotony of tyranny began to wear through the long Teutonic patience to the under-quick of Wendish madness.
It chanced that one night I could not sleep.

It was no matter of maids that kept me awake, though by this time I was sixteen or seventeen and greatly grown--running, it is true, mostly to knees and elbows, but nevertheless long of limb and stark of bone, needing only the muscle laid on in lumps to be as strong as any.
I had begun to steal out at nights too--not on any ill errand, but that I might have the company of those about my own age--'prentice lads and the wilder sons of burghers, who had no objection to my parentage, and thought it rather a fine thing to be hand-in-glove with the son of the Red Axe of Thorn.