l
Press.

THE INTERLOPERS

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 t