S. R. Crockett

“ Shall we shoot them and be done?”
“God forbid!” cried the Count, who was more tender of heart, and had seen enough killing of late, “they may have those that love them. Even as you, Alt Karl, have the little Gertrud in the cottage by the pine-wood.”
“Wolves and swine have not Trudas,” muttered Alt Karl rebelliously. “They had been safer shot, for they are the very spawn of death and full of the treachery of the devil!”
“Speak to them,” said the Count wearily, “and tell them that they are free to return to their homes. We have not force to hold them and do our duty also. ”

“ So accurate was the young girl’s aim that the charge of the convicts was retarded, though not wholly prevented. As Gertrud clanged the door and shot the bolts, two men flung themselves against it and one fired his gun into the keyhole. But the solid oak and the good iron bolts stood the stress.
“To your wicket!” cried Truda; “I shall go back to my window.”
She only reached her station in time to see the disappointed assailants running back to cover. But the lawn was fairly sprinkled with the wounded, some limping, some crawling, and a few more lying deadly still. ”

“ So that instead of having thick woods all the way to the cleft’s mouth, she had to cross an open space of twenty yards of flower-sprinkled grass.
When Gertrud emerged upon this little woodland cirque, where a thousand times as a child she had spread her cups and baked her mudpies in her girlish housewifery, she almost tripped over half a dozen men all lying on the grass. She swerved to the right in order to avoid them. One or two sprang after her with growls like wild beasts, and to avoid these new assailants Truda had to dodge between her first pursuers. ”

“ Of this Alt Karl informed the Count with an upward movement of his head, somewhat like a duck giving thanks to a kind Providence. Then up rose St. Polten.
“Stop!” he cried loudly to the men beneath. “To what penal establishment do you belong; and where is the officer in charge?”
The convicts, in Austrian prison uniform, stood still with open mouths on the road beneath; but so astonished were they that no one answered. Only from far back in their straggling ranks a rifle cracked, and a twig spat close by the Count’s ear. ”

“ If any one was to go for help it must be himself, that was St. Polten’s solution. “If we are to die, why die we must,” was that of Alt Karl.
But in her heart the girl refused to accept either. The Count certainly could not go, because he did not know the only practicable way to St. Polten, that through Martin’s Loch. Her father might be ready and willing to die—but not so she, nor, if she judged aright, the Count either. So Truda looked carefully to her revolver, which had been her father’s during the war, and slipped it loosely into the pocket of her hunter’s coat, ready to her hand. ”

“ The dark comes swiftly enough among the wooded foothills of St. Polten. The sun was already set and the brown shades were cooling into blue with the rising of the night mist out of the hollow places.
Truda laid her plans rapidly. She arranged her half-dozen guns in a row and then discharged them one after the other, lifting them in turn to her shoulder and firing them into the belt of woodland through which she meant to run. The Count came anxiously upstairs to see if she had precipitated a general engagement. ”

“ Rarely had Gertrud’s heart beat so wildly as when she dashed across the lawn into the thick blackness of the woods. Her hand was on her pistol, for she knew that she risked infinitely more than her own life upon the issue of her quest. She might, for instance, for all she knew, have run straight into the arms of the cruel and lurking foe. ”

“ But before he had gone a dozen yards a second shot was fired from the left. Alt Karl wavered, stumbled, and went over on his face with a swirl, his gun exploding as he fell.
By this time Truda had the front door open and was on the point of rushing forth to succour her father. But Count St. Polten took her by the shoulder roughly and thrust her behind him.
“Stay where you are,” he commanded; “he is too heavy for you to carry.”
And he laid down his gun on the sparred rustic seat in the porch and rushed across the lawn bareheaded. Bullets whistled about him as he ran. ”

“ But in a moment he had reached the side of the fallen man. He stooped and raised Alt Karl in his arms. A crowd of men broke from the coverts on right and left, and with fierce howls of rage rushed towards the Count, who stumbled under his heavy burden.
Nevertheless he carried his Jagdmeister swiftly enough in his arms towards the open door. As he came he saw Gertrud kneeling upon one knee behind the trellis of the porch. Swiftly she fired one gun and then another till she had exhausted her battery. ”

“ For it was evident that the convicts had found more arms and ammunition in the burning château.
A solitary gun replied fitfully from the windows of the châlet.
So busy were the besiegers that the cavalry were actually among them with the sword before they were aware. And then with what wild yells of terror the wretched men fled for the shelter of the woods, the horsemen riding them down mercilessly, so that but few escaped. For the marvellous light of the burning palace shone every way, even into the densest thickets. ”

“ The enemy!” muttered Under-Officer Alt Karl.
“The brushwood is good enough for me,” said his colonel, the Count of St. Polten-Vassima. And with the alertness of a mountaineer he betook himself to cover till the enemy should develop his strength. It was the Count’s duty to protect the hill-road which crosses the Austrian Alps to Verona, to mask the weakness of the fortresses of Moelk and Neustadt, to forward supplies from the Tyrol, and generally to retrieve an irretrievable misfortune with which he and his men had had nothing whatever to do. ”

“ Her feet gripped the broad firm edge, and she tip-toed out upon it to feel for the rowan tree which used to grow from a cleft to the right. It was gone, and Truda’s heart for the first time fluttered wildly. It would be terrible should she be fixed all night on this bare limestone ledge, like a beetle pinned to a wall, while the fiends above were making an end of the one most dear to her on earth—that is, of her father. ”

“ Polten-Vassima kept the road which leads to Verona, and day nor night none came near him. For all the peasant folk were fled, the barns were exhausted or plundered, and all the fields were desolate. It was not long before there came a day when the men wanted food. So the Count bade Under-Officer Richter, who was also Alt Karl and his own Jagdmeister, to serve five rounds of ammunition to each of the five best shots and let them go out to kill wood-pigeons, where a few corn patches were not quite trampled down and the wheat began to be ruddy. ”

“ I shall go to the gable window above, whence I shall be able to see any who may attack us across the grass.”
“But why trouble yourself at all?” the Count St. Polten began, a little proudly. “I can account for any dozen of these dogs of the prisons.”
“Ah! but,” said little Truda wisely, “they are too many for you. I have counted ten already, and such rascals as they would never fight fair but would shoot you in the back.”
And she almost pushed him to his position in the angle at which he had seen the face of the spy. ”

“ Polten-Vassima can wed where he chooses. The Emperor himself has said it.”
“But,” faltered Truda, compelling her rebellious heart to be still, “there are ladies, beautiful and clever, in Vienna, in Paris, in all the cities where you will go.”
The Count laughed a little, and pointed up to the trees which nodded over the defile, at the bottom of which lay the perilous pass through which she had passed so lately.
“Beautiful ladies—clever ladies—without doubt many, little one. But which of these beautiful ladies would have risked Martin’s Loch at blackest night for me? ”

“ The sun smote overbearingly down upon them, so that the humming of the bees and the shrill whistle of the cicadas almost ceased as the performers retired to take their siestas till the sun should creep a little lower in the white-hot sky. ”

“ Polten. The path led uphill all the way, but the men set themselves light-heartedly to their task. And first of them all, with the Colonel a little way behind her, rode the Breslau school-girl upon a cavalry saddle.
And as they went they came in sight of that which made them spur yet faster and more fiercely—the flames of a burning house mounting redly to the skies. The heart of the maid throbbed violently. ”

“ She will do nothing but play pranks or scour the hills with a gun, and boasts that she is as good a jäger as there is in all the forest (which is a thing most true) —besides being as good a mountaineer as there is on the mountains, as if these were worthy ambitions for a young girl. ”

“ The Count awoke from a kind of day-dream, to find himself calculating how old this girl might be who sat so innocently with him in the house of Alt Karl.
“‘Twenty-one and a rosebud?’” he quoted, thinking aloud.
CHAPTER V.
The Siege of the Châlet. But Gertrud did not seem to hear. She was looking at something across the open grassy space, with parted lips and eager wide-open eyes.
“Look!” she cried, manifestly troubled; “look! there are two or three men hiding yonder in the shadow. They are not folk of St. Polten nor of the neighbourhood.” ”

“ It was the Count and her father whose death the convicts aimed at. For herself, not knowing the hearts of the human wild beast, she had no fear. Indeed, had she known all, the worst would not have affrighted her so long as within the chambers of her father’s revolver there slumbered an alternative.
From childhood Gertrud had dwelt in this place. For fifteen years she had tried every path, tested every hiding-place and descended into every hollow in all the jagged tangle of honeycombed limestone country about St. Polten. She remembered especially the long ravine cleft of St. ”