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In a forest of mixed growth somewhere on the easterly 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 indoors 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 sportsmans calendar as lawful and proper for the chase Ulrich von Gradwitz patrolled the dark forest in interest of a human enemy. The forest lands of Gradwitz were of wide extent and well stocked with with game the narrow strip of precipitous woodland that lay on its outskirt was non remarkable for the game it harboured or the shooting it afforded, scarce it was the most jealously guarded of all its owners territorial possessions. A far-famed law suit, in the days of his grandfather, had wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of trivial landowners the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment of the Courts, and a keen-sighted series of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the families for three generations. The neighbour fight had grown into a personal one since Ulrich had come to be send 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 hostility 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 anothers blood, as men apiece prayed that misfortune might fall on the other, and this wind-scourged winter night Ulrich had band together his foresters to watch the dark forest, not in quest of quadrupedal quarry, but to keep a look-out for the prowling thieves whom he suspected of being afoot(predicate) 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 use to sleep through the dark hours. Assuredly there was a distressful element in the forest, and Ulrich could guess the quarter from whence it came. 2 He strayed away by himself from the watchers