The Interlopers

The Interlopers

In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the

eastern spurs of the Carpathians, 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.

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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.

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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 early

blinded with the blood which trickled across his eyes,

stopped his struggling for a moment to listen, and then

gave a short, snarling laugh.

caught, anyway,

Ulrich von Gradwitz snared in his stolen forest. There's

real justice for you!