In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the eastern spurs of the Carpathians,1 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 10 stocked with game; the narrow strip of precipitous woodland
that lay on its outskirt was not remarkable for the game it har- bored 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 ille- gal possession of a neighboring family of petty landowners; the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment of the courts, and a long series of poaching affrays2 and similar scan-