“It is twelve, is it not, Fritz?”

“A quarter to twelve.”

“Very well; then the old woman has got seven hours’ start of us.  We must follow upon her trail step by step; on horseback we can do it in half the time, and, if she is still going, about seven or eight to-night we have got her, Fritz.  Now then, we’re off.”

And we started afresh upon the track.  It led us straight to the mountains.

Galloping away, Sperver said—­

“If good luck only would have it that she had rested an hour or two in a hole in a rock, we might be up with her before the daylight is gone.”

“Let us hope so, Gideon.”

“Oh, don’t think of it.  The old she-wolf is always moving; she never tires; she tramps along all the hollows in the Black Forest.  We must not flatter ourselves with vain hopes.  If, perhaps, she has stopped on her journey, so much the better for us; and if she still keeps going, we won’t let that discourage us.  Come on at a gallop.”

It is a very strange feeling to be hunting down a fellow-creature; for, after all, that unhappy woman was of our own kind and nature; endowed like ourselves with an immortal soul to be saved, she felt, and thought, and reflected like ourselves.  It is true that a strange perversion of human nature had brought her near to the nature of the wolf, and that some great mystery overshadowed her being.  No doubt a wandering life had obliterated the moral sense in her, and even almost effaced the human character; but still nothing in the world can give one man a right to exercise over another the dominion of the man over the brute.

And yet a burning ardour hurried us on in pursuit; my blood was at fever heat; I was determined to stand at no obstacle in laying hold of this extraordinary being.  A wolf-hunt or a boar-hunt would not have excited me near so much.

The snow was flying in our rear; sometimes splinters of ice, bitten off by the horse-shoes, like shavings of iron from machinery, whizzed past our ears.

Sperver, sometimes with his nose in the air and his red moustache floating in the wind, sometimes with his grey eyes intently following the track, reminded me of those famous Cossacks that I had seen pass through Germany when I was a boy; and his tall, lanky horse, muscular and full-maned, its body as slender as a greyhound’s, completed the illusion.

Lieverle, in a high state of enthusiasm and excitement, took bounds sometimes as high as our horses’ backs, and I could not but tremble at the thought that when we came up at last with the Pest he might tear her in pieces before we could prevent him.

But the old woman gave us all the trouble she could; on every hill she doubled, at every hillock there was a false track.

“After all, it is easy here,” cried Sperver, “to what it will be in the wood.  We shall have to keep our eyes open there!  Do you see the accursed beast?  Here she has confused the track!  There she has been amusing herself sweeping the trail, and then from that height which is exposed to the wind she has slipped down to the stream, and has crept along through the cresses to get to the underwood.  But for those two footsteps she would have sold us completely.”