The hands that had held me abruptly loosened their grip, and I was free.

I raised my bound wrists to my brow and tried to push the bandage back.

But it was firmly tied, and it was but dimly that I saw the hall of the White Wolf filled with the armed men of the Duke's body-guard, boisterously laughing, with their hands on their sides, or kicking over the mock throne covered with white cloth, the coils of rope, the axes of painted wood, and the other properties of this very faint-hearted Fehmgericht.
"But what have we here ?" they cried, when they came upon me, bound and helpless, with the bandage only half pushed off my eyes.
"Heave him up on his pins, and let us look at him," quoth a burly guardsman.

"I trust he is no one of any account.

I want not to see another such job done on a poor scheming knave like that last, when the Duke Casimir settled accounts with Hans Pulitz!" "Ha! ha!" laughed his companion; "a rare jest, i' faith; 'tis the son of our own Red Axe--a prisoner of the White Wolf and ready for the edge.