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In a plant of flux growth mostwhere on the eastern spurs of the Karpathians, a piece of music stood unitary winter night watching and listening, as though he waited for some beast of the woods to come within the range of his vision, and, later, of his rifle. But the bet for whose presence he kept so keen an outlook was no(prenominal) that figured in the sportsmans calendar as lawful and proper for the hang back Ulrich von Gradwitz patrolled the unlighted forest in quest of a human enemy. The forest lands of Gradwitz were of wide extent and well stocked with game the narrow flake of precipitous woodland that lay on its outskirt was not scarce for the game it harboured or the shooting it afforded, but it was the most jealously guard of all its owners territorial possessions. A famous law suit, in the long time of his grandfather, had wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty landowners the dispossessed party had neer acquiesced in the judgm ent of the Courts, and a long series of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the families for three generations. The neighbour feud had grown into a own(prenominal) one since Ulrich had come to be head of his family if there was a man in the world whom he detested and wished ill to it was Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of the bitterness and the tireless game-snatcher and raider of the disputed border-forest. The feud might, perhaps, have died down or been compromised if the personal ill-will of the two men had not stood in the way as boys they had thirsted for one anothers blood, as men each prayed that misfortune might excise on the other, and this wind-scourged winter night Ulrich had banded together his foresters to watch the grim forest, not in quest of four-footed quarry, but to keep a look-out for the prowling thieves whom he suspected of being afoot from across the land boundary. The roebuck, which commonly kept in the sheltered ho llows during a storm-wind, were running like set things to-night, and there was movement and unrest among the creatures that were wont to sleep through the dark hours. Assuredly there was a disturbing element in the forest, and Ulrich could evaluate the quarter from whence it came. 2 He strayed away by himself from the watchers