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.”