“Ah, yes, to be sure!  Well, I recognised that track and started off in pursuit.  I was hoping to catch the creature in her lair, but I will tell you the way she took me.  I climbed up the bank by the roadside, only two gunshots from Nideck.  I go along the hill, keeping the track on my right; it led along the side of the wood in the Rhethal.  All at once it jumps over the ditch into the wood.  I stuck to it, but, happening to look a little to my left, I saw another track which had, been following the Black Plague.  I stopped short:  was it Sperver’s? or Kasper Trumpfs? or whose?  I came to it, and you may fancy how astounded I was when I saw that it was nobody from our place!  I know every foot in the Schwartzwald from Fribourg to Nideck.  That foot was like none of ours.  It must have come from a distance.  The boot—­for it was a kind of well-made, soft gentleman’s boot, with spurs, which leave a little print behind them—­the boot was not round at the toes, but square.  The sole was thin, and bent with every step, and it had no nails in it.  The walk was rapid, and the short steps were like those of a young man of twenty to five-and-twenty.  I noticed the stitches in the side leather at once, and I think I never saw finer.”

“Who can this be?” Sperver exclaimed.

Sebalt raised his shoulders and extended his hands, but said nothing.

“Who can have any object in following the old woman?” I asked Sperver.

“No one on earth can tell,” was the reply.

And so we sat a few minutes meditating over what we had heard.

At last he went on again with his narrative:—­

“I kept following the track; it went up the next ridge through the pine-forest.  When it doubled round the Koche Fendue I said to myself, ’Ah, you accursed plague!  If there was much game of your sort there would not be much sport; it would be preferable to work like a nigger!’ So we all three arrive—­the two tracks and I—­at the top of the Schneeberg.  There the wind had been blowing hard; the snow was knee-deep—­but no matter!  I must get on!  I got to the edge of the torrent of the Steinbach, and there I lost the track.  I halted, and I saw that, after trying up and down in several directions, the gentleman’s boots had gone down the Tiefenbach.  That was a bad sign.  I looked along the other side of the torrent, but there was no appearance of a track there—­none at all!  The old hag had paddled up and down the stream to throw any one off the scent who should try to follow her.  Where was I to go to?—­right, or left, or straight on?  Not knowing, I came back to Nideck.”

“You haven’t told us about her breakfast,” said Sperver.

“No, I was forgetting.  At the foot of Roche Fendue I saw there had been a fire; there was a black place; I laid my hand upon it, thinking it might be warm, which would have proved that the Black Plague had not gone far; but it was as cold as ice.  Close by I saw a wire trap in the bushes.  It seems the creature knows how to snare game.  A hare had been caught in it; the print of its body was still plain, lying flat in the snow.  The witch had lighted the fire to cook it; she had had a good breakfast, I’ll be bound.”