e tallow candles shone again through the
darkness, it fell upon three shapes which had sunk upon their knees in
terror, the two 'prentices of the headsman, and the monster. But the
proud, defiant virago turned towards the elder of the 'prentices, and
looked him up and down contemptuously.

"Then you, too, are one of them, eh?" cried she.

"Did you not hear the cry of the death-bird?" stammered he.

"What are you afraid of? Tis only my half-crazy old mother."

* * * * *

At night the headsman's apprentices sleep on the floor of the loft. The
headsman himself has a room overlooking the courtyard; Mekipiros slept
in the stable outside with the watch-dog.

All was silent. Outside, the wind had died away, not the leaf of a tree
was stirring; one could distinguish the deep breathing of the sleepers.

At such times the lightest sound fills the sleepless watcher with fear.
Sometimes he fancies that a man hidden beneath the bed is slowly raising
his head, or that someone is lifting a latch, or the wind shakes the
door as if someone were rattling it from the outside. There is a humming
and a buzzing all around one. Night beetles have somehow or other lit
upon a piece of paper, and they crinkle it so that it sounds as if
someone were writing in the dark. Out in the street men seem to be
running to and fro and muttering hoarsely in each other's ears. The
church clocks strike one after another, thrice, four times--one cannot
tell how often. The time is horribly long and the night is an abyss of
blackness.

On a bed of straw, with a coarse coverlet thrown over them, the
headsman's two apprentices sleep side by side. Are they really asleep?
Can they sleep at all in such a place? Yet their eyes are closed. No,
one of them is not asleep. When he perceives that his comrade does not
move, he slowly pushes the coverlet from off him and creeps on all fours
into the inner room; there he lies down flat on his stomach and peeps
through a crevice in the rafters. Then he arises, creeps on tiptoe to
the chimney and knocks at the partition wall three times, then he climbs
down from his loft by means of a ladder, withdraws the ladder from the
opening, and whistles to the watch-dog to come forth. One can hear how
the chained beast scratches his neck, and growling and sniffing lies
down before the door of the loft.

Meanwhile the other apprentice has been carefully observing every
movement of his companion wit