The dwarf chuckled with inward glee. He seemed to rejoice in Bennett’s unpopularity.
“And what,” asked Bennett, not wholly pleased with the jester’s untimely jocularity, “what has been the result of your thousand years of discovery in this ancient pile? You started out to tell me.”
“It has been,” answered the dwarf, seeming to weigh his words carefully, “it has been to make me king. These puppets come and go and wear the crown and hold the sceptre, but through the centuries I am monarch of Hesse-Heilfels. I could tell you tales that would make your black hair turn white, tales of my power—of my power, the jester, Cousin Fritz, a buffoon for a thousand years!”
There was something so uncanny in the little wizard’s words and manner that Bennett could hardly repress a gesture of abhorrence. A madman smoking a cigar in the moonlight on a balcony overlooking the Rhine was a creature so out of touch with nineteenth-century ideas that Bennett was tempted to believe that he had fallen asleep and had been attacked by a nightmare.
Suddenly Cousin Fritz hopped down from his perch and sprang toward Bennett. The movement was so sudden that the American had no time to rise.
“Look there,” whispered the dwarf, pointing with trembling hand toward a group of trees at the edge of the park, several hundred feet in front of them. “Do you see those shadows among the trees?”
Bennett’s eyes followed the little man’s gesture. He could make out the figures of several men who had gathered in a group beneath the trees. The moon painted their shadows black against the greensward.
“Do you know what they seek?” asked the dwarf, shaking with inward laughter. “They seek your life, Herr Bennett! Isn’t that a joke? I couldn’t make a better one, could I?”
The American felt an almost irresistible impulse to hurl the uncanny creature into the abyss beneath them. The dwarf’s idea of humor did not appeal to Bennett. As a Yankee he possessed a keen appreciation of the ludicrous, but the prospect of assassination did not strike him as laughable. Cousin Fritz—abnormally sympathetic as he was—realized that his companion was not in a joyous mood.
“Don’t be alarmed, Herr Bennett,” he said, “what I tell you is true. I heard those men planning your death. They hate you because my cousin Rudolph has grown fond of you. But, never fear, I will save you from their machinations. Did I not tell you that I had been King of Hesse-Heilfels for a thousand years? Well, the king is on your side. I decree that you shall not die. Do you doubt my power to save you? Look here!”