now the third night had come. The moon was hanging midway in the
sky, white and full, for it was barely past midnight.

The high precipitous banks of the rocky road threw a dense black
shadow into the gully below, and in that crooked inky line that
scarred the white face of the moonlit rocks a band of some
thirty men were creeping slowly and stealthily nearer and nearer
to Castle Drachenhausen. At the head of them was a tall, slender
knight clad in light chain armor, his head covered only by a
steel cap or bascinet.

Along the shadow they crept, with only now and then a faint
clink or jingle of armor to break the stillness, for most of
those who followed the armed knight were clad in leathern
jerkins; only one or two wearing even so much as a steel breast-
plate by way of armor.

So at last they reached the chasm that yawned beneath the
roadway, and there they stopped, for they had reached the spot
toward which they had been journeying. It was Baron Henry of
Trutz-Drachen who had thus come in the silence of the night time
to the Dragon's house, and his visit boded no good to those
within.

The Baron and two or three of his men talked together in low
tones, now and then looking up at the sheer wall that towered
above them.

"Yonder is the place, Lord Baron," said one of those who stood
with him. "I have scanned every foot of the wall at night for a