CHAPTER XIX.
Throughout the whole of the battle and until night-fall, the folks of Grandfontaine had seen the fool Yégof standing on the summit of the Little Donon, his crown on his head, his sceptre uplifted, transmitting, like a Merovingian king, orders to his imaginary armies.
What passed through the mind of this unhappy being when he saw the utter rout of the Germans, no one knows. At the last cannon-shot he had disappeared. Whither had he fled?
This is what is related on this subject by the inhabitants of Tiefenbach.
At that time, there lived in the Bocksberg two singular creatures, two sisters, one called Little Kateline and the other Big Berbel. These two tattered beings had fixed their abode in the Cavern of Luitprandt, so called, say the old chronicles, because the King of the Germans, before descending into Alsace, caused to be interred under that immense vault of red freestone the barbarian chiefs who fell in the battle of Blutfeld. The warm spring that rises always in the middle of the cavern protected the two sisters against the rigorous colds of winter, and the wood-cutter, Daniel Horn, of Tiefenbach, had had the charity to close up the principal entrance of the rock with heaps of broom and brushwood. By the side of the warm spring was another, cold as ice, and clear as crystal. Little Kateline, who drank at this spring, was not four feet high; she was stout and squat, and her vacant look, round eyes, and an enormous wen, gave to her the singular expression of a fat turkey in a meditative mood. Every Sunday she was in the habit of lugging to the village of Tiefenbach a wicker basket, which the good people filled with cold potatoes, crusts of bread, and sometimes—on festivals—with cakes and other leavings of their merry-makings. Then the poor creature, quite out of breath, returned to her rocky home, chuckling, laughing, gibbering, and crying all at once. Big Berbel was very careful not to drink at the cold spring; she was lean, one-eyed, and as skinny as a bat; she had a flat nose, large ears, a sparkling eye, and lived on what her sister managed to pick up; but in July, when the very hot weather had set in, she used to shake from the mountain-side a dry thistle over the harvest-fields of those who had not regularly filled Kateline's basket, which brought down upon them fearful storms, hail, rats, and field-mice in abundance.
For which reason they dreaded the spells of Berbel like the plague; she was known everywhere by the name of Wetterhexe,[10] whilst little Kateline passed everywhere for being the good genius of Tiefenbach and its neighbourhood. In this way Berbel lived at her ease, by folding her arms, and the other by clucking and pecking for it wherever it was to be found.
Unfortunately for the two sisters, Yégof had established, for a number of years past, his winter residence in Luitprandt's Cave. It was from thence that he took his departure in the spring, to visit his innumerable castles, and pass in review his fiefs as far as Geierstein, in the Hundsrück. Every year, therefore, towards the end of November, after the first snows, he came with his raven, which always produced a succession of eagle-like croaks from Wetterhexe.
"What is the matter with you," he would say, quietly installing himself in the best place; "are you not living on my domains? I think it is very good of me to keep two useless valkiries in the Valhalla of my fathers."