But the steam was screaming
itself so loudly that no one, had there been anyone nigh, would have
heard him; and in another minute or so the train stopped with a jar
and a jerk, and he in his cage could hear men crying aloud, "Muenchen!
Muenchen!"
Then he knew enough of geography to know that he was in the heart of
Bavaria. He had had an uncle killed in the Bayerischenwald by the
Bavarian forest guards, when in the excitement of hunting a black bear
he had overpassed the limits of the Tyrol frontier.
That fate of his kinsman, a gallant young chamois-hunter who had
taught him to handle a trigger and load a muzzle, made the very name
of Bavaria a terror to August.
"It is Bavaria! It is Bavaria!" he sobbed to the stove; but the stove
said nothing to him; it had no fire in it. A stove can no more speak
without fire than a man can see without light. Give it fire, and it
will sing to you, tell tales to you, offer you in return all the
sympathy you ask.
"It is Bavaria!" sobbed August; for it is always a name of dread
augury to the Tyroleans, by reason of those bitter struggles and
midnight shots and untimely deaths which come from those meetings of
jaeger and hunter in the Bayerischenwald. But the train stopped; Munich
was reached, and August, hot and cold by turns, and shaking like a
little aspen-leaf, felt himself once more carried out on the shoulders
of men, rolled along on a truck, and finally set down, where he knew
not, only he knew he was thirsty--so thirsty! If only he could have
reached his hand out and scooped up a little snow!
He thought he had been moved on this truck many miles, but in truth
the stove had been only taken from the railway-station to a shop in
the Marienplatz.
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