No, nothing--no, I tell
you, on my word, I set more store by a good gelding or an English dog.
That for your Otto!'

'He's not my Otto,' growled Kuno.

'Then I don't know whose he is,' was the retort.

'You would put your hand in the fire for him to-morrow,' said Kuno,
facing round.

'Me!' cried the huntsman. 'I would see him hanged! I'm a Grunewald
patriot--enrolled, and have my medal, too; and I would help a prince!
I'm for liberty and Gondremark.'

'Well, it's all one,' said Kuno. 'If anybody said what you said, you
would have his blood, and you know it.'

'You have him on the brain,' retorted his companion. 'There he goes!' he
cried, the next moment.

And sure enough, about a mile down the mountain, a rider on a white horse
was seen to flit rapidly across a heathy open and vanish among the trees
on the farther side.

'In ten minutes he'll be over the border into Gerolstein,' said Kuno.
'It's past cure.'

'Well, if he founders that mare, I'll never forgive him,' added the
other, gathering his reins.

And as they turned down from the knoll to rejoin their comrades, the sun
dipped and disappeared, and the woods fell instantly into the gravity and
greyness of the early night.

CHAPTER II--IN WHICH THE PRINCE PLAYS HAROUN-AL-RASCHID

The night fell upon the Prince while he was threading green tracks in the
lower valleys of the wood; and though the stars came out overhead and
displayed the interminable order of the pine-tree pyramids, regular and
dark like cypresses, their light was of small service to a traveller in
such lonely paths, and from thenceforth he rode at random. The austere
face of nature, the uncertain issue of his course, the open sky and the
free air, delighted him like wine; and the hoarse chafing of a river on
his left sounded in his ears agreeably.

It was past eight at night before his toil was rewarded and he issued at
last out of the forest on the firm white high-road. It lay downhill
before him, with a sweeping eastward trend, faintly bright between the
thickets; and Otto paused and gazed upon it. So it ran, league after
league, still joining others, to the farthest ends of Europe, there
skirting the sea-surge, here gleaming in the lights of cities; and the
innumerable army of tramps and travellers moved upon it in all lands as
by a common impulse, and were now in all places drawing near to the inn
door and the night's rest. The pictures swarmed and vanished in his