The

The Welcome back everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales.

This is your host, John Haggardorn, and it's great to have you with us today.

Our story today, Count Conrad's Courtship by Robert Barr.

It's a story of castles, knights, and maidens.

Hope you enjoy it.

It was nearly midnight when Count Conrad von Huckstein reached his castle on the Rhine,

with a score of very

tired and hungry men behind him. The warder at the gate of Schloss Huxedaden, after some cautious

parley with the newcomers, joyously threw apart the two great iron-studded oaken leaves of the

portal when he was convinced that it was indeed his young master, who had arrived after some tumultuous

years at the Crusades, and Count Conrad, with his followers, rode clattering under the stone

arch into the ample courtyard. It is recorded that, in the great hall of the castle, the Count

and his twenty bronzed and scarred knights ate such a meal as had never before been seen to disappear in Hockstaden,

and that after drinking with great cheer to the downfall of the Saracene and the triumph of the true cross,

they all lay on the floor of the Ritterzol and slept the remainder of the night,

the whole of the next day, and did not awaken until the dawn of the second morning.

They had had years of hard fighting in the east, and on the way home they had been compelled

to work their passion through the domains of turbulent nobles by good stout broadsword blay,

the only argument their opposers could understand, and thus they had come through to the Rhine without contributing ought to their opponents except fierce blows,

which were not commodities as marketable as yellow gold.

Yet with this sole exchange did the 21 win their way from Palestine to the Palatinate,

...