he 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 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.

"So you're not killed, as you ought to be, but you're caught,