VI
August had often hung about the little station, watching thetrains come and go and dive into the heart of the hills andvanish. No one said anything to him for idling about; people arekind-hearted and easy of temper in this pleasant land, andchildren and dogs are both happy there. He heard the Bavariansarguing and vociferating a great deal, and learned that theymeant to go too and wanted to go with the great stove itself. Butthis they could not do, for neither could the stove go by apassenger-train nor they themselves go in a goods-train. So atlength they insured their precious burden for a large sum, andconsented to send it by a luggage-train which was to pass throughHall in half an hour. The swift trains seldom deign to notice theexistence of Hall at all.
August heard, and a desperate resolve made itself up in hislittle mind. Where Hirschvogel went would he go. He gave oneterrible thought to Dorothea--poor, gentle Dorothea!--sitting inthe cold at home, then set to work to execute his project. How hemanaged it he never knew very clearly himself, but certain it isthat when the goods-train from the north, that had come all theway from Linz on the Danube, moved out of Hall, August was hiddenbehind the stove in the great covered truck, and wedged, unseenand undreamt of by any human creature, amidst the cases ofwood-carving, of clocks and clock-work, of Vienna toys, ofTurkish carpets, of Russian skins, of Hungarian wines, whichshared the same abode as did his swathed and bound Hirschvogel.No doubt he was very naughty, but it never occurred to him thathe was so: his whole mind and soul were absorbed in the oneentrancing idea, to follow his beloved friend and fire-king.
It was very dark in the closed truck, which had only a littlewindow above the door; and it was crowded, and had a strong smellin it from the Russian hides and the hams that were in it. ButAugust was not frightened; he was close to Hirschvogel, andpresently he meant to be closer still; for he meant to do nothingless than get inside Hirschvogel itself. Being a shrewd littleboy, and having had by great luck two silver groschen in hisbreeches-pocket, which he had earned the day before by choppingwood, he had bought some bread and sausage at the station of awoman there who knew him, and who thought he was going out to hisuncle Joachim's chalet above Jenbach. This he had with him, andthis he ate in the darkness and the lumbering, pounding,thundering noise which made him giddy, as never had he been in atrain of any kind before. Still he ate, having had no breakfast,and being a child, and half a German, and not knowing at all howor when he ever would eat again.
When he had eaten, not as much as he wanted, but as much as hethought was prudent (for who could say when he would be able tobuy anything more?), he set to work like a little mouse to make ahole in the withes of straw and hay which enveloped the stove. Ifit had been put in a packing-case he would have been defeated atthe onset. As it was, he gnawed, and nibbled, and pulled, andpushed, just as a mouse would have done, making his hole where heguessed that the opening of the stove was,--the opening throughwhich he had so often thrust the big oak logs to feed it. No onedisturbed him; the heavy train went lumbering on and on, and hesaw nothing at all of the beautiful mountains, and shiningwaters, and great forests through which he was being carried. Hewas hard at work getting through the straw and hay and twistedropes; and get through them at last he did, and found the door ofthe stove, which he knew so well, and which was quite largeenough for a child of his age to slip through, and it was thiswhich he had counted upon doing. Slip through he did, as he hadoften done at home for fun, and curled himself up there to see ifhe could anyhow remain during many hours. He found that he could;air came in through the brass fret-work of the stove; and withadmirable caution in such a little fellow he leaned out, drew thehay and straw together, and rearranged the ropes, so that no onecould ever have dreamed a little mouse had been at them. Then hecurled himself up again, this time more like a dormouse thananything else; and, being safe inside his dear Hirschvogel andintensely cold, he went fast asleep as if he were in his own bedat home with Albrecht and Christof on either side of him. Thetrain lumbered on, stopping often and long, as the habit ofgoods-trains is, sweeping the snow away with its cow-switcher,and rumbling through the deep heart of the mountains, with itslamps aglow like the eyes of a dog in a night of frost.
The train rolled on in its heavy, slow fashion, and the childslept soundly for a long while. When he did awake, it was quitedark outside in the land; he could not see, and of course he wasin absolute darkness; and for a while he was sorely frightened,and trembled terribly, and sobbed in a quiet heart-brokenfashion, thinking of them all at home. Poor Dorothea! how anxiousshe would be! How she would run over the town and walk up tograndfather's at Dorf Ampas, and perhaps even send over toJenbach, thinking he had taken refuge with Uncle Joachim! Hisconscience smote him for the sorrow he must be even then causingto his gentle sister; but it never occurred to him to try and goback. If he once were to lose sight of Hirschvogel how could heever hope to find it again? how could he ever know whither it hadgone,--north, south, east, or west? The old neighbor had saidthat the world was small; but August knew at least that it musthave a great many places in it: that he had seen himself on themaps on his schoolhouse walls. Almost any other little boy would,I think, have been frightened out of his wits at the position inwhich he found himself; but August was brave, and he had a firmbelief that God and Hirschvogel would take care of him. Themaster-potter of Nuernberg was always present to his mind, akindly, benign, and gracious spirit, dwelling manifestly in thatporcelain tower whereof he had been the maker.
A droll fancy, you say? But every child with a soul in him hasquite as quaint fancies as this one was of August's.
So he got over his terror and his sobbing both, though he was soutterly in the dark. He did not feel cramped at all, because thestove was so large, and air he had in plenty, as it came throughthe fret-work running round the top. He was hungry again, andagain nibbled with prudence at his loaf and his sausage. He couldnot at all tell the hour. Every time the train stopped and heheard the banging, stamping, shouting, and jangling of chainsthat went on, his heart seemed to jump up into his mouth. If theyshould find him out! Sometimes porters came and took away thiscase and the other, a sack here, a bale there, now a big bag, nowa dead chamois. Every time the men trampled near him, and sworeat each other, and banged this and that to and fro, he was sofrightened that his very breath seemed to stop. When they came tolift the stove out, would they find him? and if they did findhim, would they kill him? That was what he kept thinking of allthe way, all through the dark hours, which seemed without end.The goods-trains are usually very slow, and are many days doingwhat a quick train does in a few hours. This one was quicker thanmost, because it was bearing goods to the King of Bavaria;still, it took all the short winter's day and the long winter'snight and half another day to go over ground that the mail-trainscover in a forenoon. It passed great armored Kuffstein standingacross the beautiful and solemn gorge, denying the right of wayto all the foes of Austria. It passed twelve hours later, afterlying by in out-of-the-way stations, pretty Rosenheim, that marksthe border of Bavaria. And here the Nuernberg stove, with Augustinside it, was lifted out heedfully and set under a covered way.When it was lifted out, the boy had hard work to keep in hisscreams; he was tossed to and fro as the men lifted the hugething, and the earthenware walls of his beloved fire-king werenot cushions of down. However, though they swore and grumbled atthe weight of it, they never suspected that a living child wasinside it, and they carried it out on to the platform and set itdown under the roof of the goods-shed. There it passed the restof the night and all the next morning, and August was all thewhile within it.