In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of the
Karpathians, a man stood one 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 game for whose presence he
kept so keen an outlook was none that figured in the sportsman’s calendar
as lawful and proper for the chase; Ulrich von Gradwitz patrolled the
dark forest in quest of a human enemy.
The forest lands of Gradwitz were of wide extent and well stocked with
game; the narrow strip of precipitous woodland that lay on its outskirt
was not remarkable for the game it harboured or the shooting it afforded,
but it was the most jealously guarded of all its owner’s territorial
possessions. A famous law suit, in the days of his grandfather, had
wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty
landowners; the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment
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 personal 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 quarrel 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 another’s blood, as men each
prayed that misfortune might fall on the other, and this wind-scourged
winter night Ulrich had banded together his foresters to watch the dark
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 usually kept in the sheltered hollows
during a storm-wind, were running like driven 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 guess the quarter from whence it came.
He strayed away by himself from the watchers whom he had placed in ambush
on the crest of the hill, and wandered far down the steep slopes amid the
wild tangle of undergrowth, peering through the tree trunks and listening
through the whistling and skirling of the wind and the restless beating
of the branches for sight and sound of the marauders. If only on this
wild night, in this dark, lone spot, he might come across Georg Znaeym,
man to man, with none to witness—that was the wish that was uppermost in
his thoughts. And as he stepped round the trunk of a huge beech he came
face to face with the man he sought.
The two enemies stood glaring at one another for a long silent moment.
Each had a rifle in his hand, each had hate in his heart and murder
uppermost in his mind. The chance had come to give full play to the
passions of a lifetime. But a man who has been brought up under the code
of a restraining civilisation cannot easily nerve himself to shoot down
his neighbour in cold blood and without word spoken, except for an
offence against his hearth and honour. And before the moment of
hesitation had given way to action a deed of Nature’s own violence
overwhelmed them both. A fierce shriek of the storm had been answered by
a splitting crash over their heads, and ere they could leap aside a mass
of falling beech tree had thundered down on them. Ulrich von Gradwitz
found himself stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him and the
other held almost as helplessly in a tight tangle of forked branches,
while both legs were pinned beneath the fallen mass. His heavy
shooting-boots had saved his feet from being crushed to pieces, but if
his fractures were not as serious as they might have been, at least it
was evident that he could not move from his present position till some
one came to release him. The descending twig had slashed the skin of his
face, and he had to wink away some drops of blood from his eyelashes
before he could take in a general view of the disaster. At his side, so
near that under ordinary circumstances he could almost have touched him,
lay Georg Znaeym, alive and struggling, but obviously as helplessly
pinioned down as himself. All round them lay a thick-strewn wreckage of
splintered branches and broken twigs.
Relief at being alive and exasperation at his captive plight brought a
strange medley of pious thank-offerings and sharp curses to Ulrich’s
lips. Georg, who was nearly blinded with the blood which trickled across
his eyes, stopped his struggling for a moment to listen, and then gave a
short, snarling laugh.
“So you’re not killed, as you ought to be, but you’re caught, anyway,” he
cried; “caught fast. Ho, what a jest, Ulrich von Gradwitz snared in his
stolen forest. There’s real justice for you!”
And he laughed again, mockingly and savagely.
“I’m caught in my own forest-land,” retorted Ulrich. “When my men come
to release us you will wish, perhaps, that you were in a better plight
than caught poaching on a neighbour’s land, shame on you.”
Georg was silent for a moment; then he answered quietly:
“Are you sure that your men will find much to release? I have men, too,
in the forest to-night, close behind me, and _they_ will be here first
and do the releasing. When they drag me out from under these damned
branches it won’t need much clumsiness on their part to roll this mass of
trunk right over on the top of you. Your men will find you dead under a
fallen beech tree. For form’s sake I shall send my condolences to your
family.”
“It is a useful hint,” said Ulrich fiercely. “My men had orders to
follow in ten minutes time, seven of which must have gone by already, and
when they get me out—I will remember the hint. Only as you will have met
your death poaching on my lands I don’t think I can decently send any
message of condolence to your family.”
“Good,” snarled Georg, “good. We fight this quarrel out to the death,
you and I and our foresters, with no cursed interlopers to come between
us. Death and damnation to you, Ulrich von Gradwitz.”
“The same to you, Georg Znaeym, forest-thief, game-snatcher.”
Both men spoke with the bitterness of possible defeat before them, for
each knew that it might be long before his men would seek him out or find
him; it was a bare matter of chance which party would arrive first on the
scene.
Both had now given up the useless struggle to free themselves from the
mass of wood that held them down; Ulrich limited his endeavours to an
effort to bring his one partially free arm near enough to his outer
coat-pocket to draw out his wine-flask. Even when he had accomplished
that operation it was long before he could manage the unscrewing of the
stopper or get any of the liquid down his throat. But what a Heaven-sent
draught it seemed! It was an open winter, and little snow had fallen as
yet, hence the captives suffered less from the cold than might have been
the case at that season of the year; nevertheless, the wine was warming
and reviving to the wounded man, and he looked across with something like
a throb of pity to where his enemy lay, just keeping the groans of pain
and weariness from crossing his lips.
“Could you reach this flask if I threw it over to you?” asked Ulrich
suddenly; “there is good wine in it, and one may as well be as
comfortable as one can. Let us drink, even if to-night one of us dies.”
“No, I can scarcely see anything; there is so much blood caked round my
eyes,” said Georg, “and in any case I don’t drink wine with an enemy.”
Ulrich was silent for a few minutes, and lay listening to the weary
screeching of the wind. An idea was slowly forming and growing in his
brain, an idea that gained strength every time that he looked across at
the man who was fighting so grimly against pain and exhaustion. In the
pain and languor that Ulrich himself was feeling the old fierce hatred
seemed to be dying down.
“Neighbour,” he said presently, “do as you please if your men come first.
It was a fair compact. But as for me, I’ve changed my mind. If my men
are the first to come you shall be the first to be helped, as though you
were my guest. We have quarrelled like devils all our lives over this
stupid strip of forest, where the trees can’t even stand upright in a
breath of wind. Lying here to-night thinking I’ve come to think we’ve
been rather fools; there are better things in life than getting the
better of a boundary dispute. Neighbour, if you will help me to bury the
old quarrel I—I will ask you to be my friend.”
Georg Znaeym was silent for so long that Ulrich thought, perhaps, he had
fainted with the pain of his injuries. Then he spoke slowly and in
jerks.
“How the whole region would stare and gabble if we rode into the
market-square together. No one living can remember seeing a Znaeym and a
von Gradwitz talking to one another in friendship. And what peace there
would be among the forester folk if we ended our feud to-night. And if
we choose to make peace among our people there is none other to
interfere, no interlopers from outside . . . You would come and keep the
Sylvester night beneath my roof, and I would come and feast on some high
day at your castle . . . I would never fire a shot on your land, save
when you invited me as a guest; and you should come and shoot with me
down in the marshes where the wildfowl are. In all the countryside there
are none that could hinder if we willed to make peace. I never thought
to have wanted to do other than hate you all my life, but I think I have
changed my mind about things too, this last half-hour. And you offered
me your wine-flask . . . Ulrich von Gradwitz, I will be your friend.”
For a space both men were silent, turning over in their minds the
wonderful changes that this dramatic reconciliation would bring about.
In the cold, gloomy forest, with the wind tearing in fitful gusts through
the naked branches and whistling round the tree-trunks, they lay and
waited for the help that would now bring release and succour to both
parties. And each prayed a private prayer that his men might be the
first to arrive, so that he might be the first to show honourable
attention to the enemy that had become a friend.
Presently, as the wind dropped for a moment, Ulrich broke silence.
“Let’s shout for help,” he said, “in this lull our voices may
carry a little way.”
“They won’t carry far through the trees and undergrowth,” said Georg,
“but we can try. Together, then.”
The two raised their voices in a prolonged hunting call.
“Together again,” said Ulrich a few minutes later, after listening in
vain for an answering halloo.
“I heard nothing but the pestilential wind,” said Georg hoarsely.
There was silence again for some minutes, and then Ulrich gave a joyful
cry.
“I can see figures coming through the wood. They are following in the
way I came down the hillside.”
Both men raised their voices in as loud a shout as they could muster.
“They hear us! They’ve stopped. Now they see us. They’re running down
the hill towards us,” cried Ulrich.
“How many of them are there?” asked Georg.
“I can’t see distinctly,” said Ulrich; “nine or ten,”
“Then they are yours,” said Georg; “I had only seven out with me.”
“They are making all the speed they can, brave lads,” said Ulrich gladly.
“Are they your men?” asked Georg. “Are they your men?” he repeated
impatiently as Ulrich did not answer.
“No,” said Ulrich with a laugh, the idiotic chattering laugh of a man
unstrung with hideous fear.
“Who are they?” asked Georg quickly, straining his eyes to see what the
other would gladly not have seen.
“_Wolves_.”