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 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.
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,
anyway," he cried; "caught fast. Ho, what a jest, Ulrich von
Gradwitz snared in his stolen forest. There's real justice for
you!"
And he laughed again, mockingly and savagely.
"I'm caught in my own forest-land," retorted Ulrich. "When my men
come to release us you will wish, perhaps, that you were in a better
plight than caught poaching on a neighbour's land, shame on you."
Georg was silent for a moment; then he answered quietly:
"Are you sure that your men will find much to release? I have men,
too, in the forest to-night, close behind me, and THEY will be here
first and do the releasing. When they drag me out from under these
damned branches it won't need much clumsiness on their part to roll
this mass of trunk right over on the top of you. Your men will find
you dead under a fallen beech tree. For form's sake I shall send my
condolences to your family."
"It is a useful hint," said Ulrich fiercely. "My men had orders to
follow in ten minutes time, seven of which must have gone by
already, and when they get me out--I will remember the hint. Only
as you will have met your death poaching on my lands I don't think I
can decently send any message of condolence to your family."
"Good," snarled Georg, "good. We fight this quarrel out to the
death, you and I and our foresters, with no cursed interlopers to
come between us. Death and damnation to you, Ulrich von Gradwitz."
"The same to you, Georg Znaeym, forest-thief, game-snatcher."
Both men spoke with the bitterness of possible defeat before them,
for each knew that it might be long before his men would seek him
out or find him; it was a bare matter of chance which party would
arrive first on the scene.
Both had now given up the useless struggle to free themselves from
the mass of wood that held them down; Ulrich limited his endeavours
to an effort to bring his one partially free arm near enough to his
outer coat-pocket to draw out his wine-flask. Even when he had
accomplished that operation it was long before he could manage the
unscrewing of the stopper or get any of the liquid down his throat.
But what a Heaven-sent draught it seemed! It was an open winter,
and little snow had fallen as yet, hence the captives suffered less
from the cold than might have been the case at that season of the
year; nevertheless, the wine was warming and reviving to the wounded
man, and he looked across with something like a throb of pity to
where his enemy lay, just keeping the groans of pain and weariness
from crossing his lips.
"Could you reach this flask if I threw it over to you?" asked Ulrich
suddenly; "there is good wine in it, and one may as well be as
comfortable as one can. Let us drink, even if to-night one of us
dies."
"No, I can scarcely see anything; there is so much blood caked round
my eyes," said Georg, "and in any case I don't drink wine with an
enemy."
Ulrich was silent for a few minutes, and lay listening to the weary
screeching of the wind. An idea was slowly forming and growing in
his brain, an idea that gained strength every time that he looked
across at the man who was fighting so grimly against pain and
exhaustion. In the pain and languor that Ulrich himself was feeling
the old fierce hatred seemed to be dying down.
"Neighbour," he said presently, "do as you please if your men come
first. It was a fair compact. But as for me, I've changed my mind.
If my men are the first to come you shall be the first to be helped,
as though you were my guest. We have quarrelled like devils all our
lives over this stupid strip of forest, where the trees can't even
stand upright in a breath of wind. Lying here to-night thinking
I've come to think we've been rather fools; there are better things
in life than getting the better of a boundary dispute. Neighbour,
if you will help me to bury the old quarrel I--I will ask you to be
my friend."
Georg Znaeym was silent for so long that Ulrich thought, perhaps, he
had fainted with the pain of his injuries. Then he spoke slowly and
in jerks.
"How the whole region would stare and gabble if we rode into the
market-square together. No one living can remember seeing a Znaeym
and a von Gradwitz talking to one another in friendship. And what
peace there would be among the forester folk if we ended our feud
to-night. And if we choose to make peace among our people there is
none other to interfere, no interlopers from outside . . . You would
come and keep the Sylvester night beneath my roof, and I would come
and feast on some high day at your castle . . . I would never fire a
shot on your land, save when you invited me as a guest; and you
should come and shoot with me down in the marshes where the wildfowl
are. In all the countryside there are none that could hinder if we
willed to make peace. I never thought to have wanted to do other
than hate you all my life, but I think I have changed my mind about
things too, this last half-hour. And you offered me your wineflask
. . . Ulrich von Gradwitz, I will be your friend."
For a space both men were silent, turning over in their minds the
wonderful changes that this dramatic reconciliation would bring
about. In the cold, gloomy forest, with the wind tearing in fitful
gusts through the naked branches and whistling round the tree-
trunks, they lay and waited for the help that would now bring
release and succour to both parties. And each prayed a private
prayer that his men might be the first to arrive, so that he might
be the first to show honourable attention to the enemy that had
become a friend.
Presently, as the wind dropped for a moment, Ulrich broke silence.
"Let's shout for help," he said; he said; "in this lull our voices
may carry a little way."
"They won't carry far through the trees and undergrowth," said
Georg, "but we can try. Together, then."
The two raised their voices in a prolonged hunting call.
"Together again," said Ulrich a few minutes later, after listening
in vain for an answering halloo.
"I heard nothing but the pestilential wind," said Georg hoarsely.
There was silence again for some minutes, and then Ulrich gave a
joyful cry.
"I can see figures coming through the wood. They are following in
the way I came down the hillside."
Both men raised their voices in as loud a shout as they could
muster.
"They hear us! They've stopped. Now they see us. They're running
down the hill towards us," cried Ulrich.
"How many of them are there?" asked Georg.
"I can't see distinctly," said Ulrich; "nine or ten,"
"Then they are yours," said Georg; "I had only seven out with me."
"They are making all the speed they can, brave lads," said Ulrich
gladly.
"Are they your men?" asked Georg. "Are they your men?" he repeated
impatiently as Ulrich did not answer.
"No," said Ulrich with a laugh, the idiotic chattering laugh of a
man unstrung with hideous fear.
"Who are they?" asked Georg quickly, straining his eyes to see what
the other would gladly not have seen.
"Wolves."
_________
-THE END-
[Hector Hugh Munro] Saki's short story: The Interlopers
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