brave, he would have broken out of any dungeon. The boy had invented for
himself a dozen endings to the story.

"Did no one ever find his sword or his cap--or hear anything or guess
anything about him ever--ever--ever?" he would say restlessly again and
again.

One winter's night, as they sat together before a small fire in a cold
room in a cold city in Austria, he had been so eager and asked so many
searching questions, that his father gave him an answer he had never
given him before, and which was a sort of ending to the story, though
not a satisfying one:

"Everybody guessed as you are guessing. A few very old shepherds in the
mountains who like to believe ancient histories relate a story which
most people consider a kind of legend. It is that almost a hundred years
after the prince was lost, an old shepherd told a story his long-dead
father had confided to him in secret just before he died. The father had
said that, going out in the early morning on the mountain side, he had
found in the forest what he at first thought to be the dead body of a
beautiful, boyish, young huntsman. Some enemy had plainly attacked him
from behind and believed he had killed him. He was, however, not quite
dead, and the shepherd dragged him into a cave where he himself often
took refuge from storms with his flocks. Since there was such riot and
disorder in the city, he was afraid to speak of what he had found; and,
by the time he discovered that he was harboring the prince, the king
had already been killed, and an even worse man had taken possession of
his throne, and ruled Samavia with a blood-stained, iron hand. To the
terrified and simple peasant the safest thing seemed to get the wounded
youth out of the country before there was any chance of his being