"I came through the forest," replied Michael, going up to the priest, who kindly held out his hand to him.
Wolfram laughed scornfully. "Didn't I tell your reverence? He didn't dare to go through the village,--I knew it."
Michael paid not the slightest heed to the apparently well-grounded accusation, being well used to such treatment from his foster-father, who now took his hat and made ready to go.
"I must go up to the fenced forest," he said; "it looks badly there: more than a dozen of the tallest trees are torn down; the Wild Huntsman has made terrible work there lately."
"You mean the storms of the last week, Wolfram?"
"No, it was the Wild Huntsman, your reverence. He is abroad every night this spring. The day before yesterday, as we came through the wood at dusk, the whole mad crew swept by not a hundred yards away. They raged and howled and stormed as though all hell had broken loose, and I suppose a bit of it had done so. Michael, stupid fool, would have rushed into the thick of it, but I caught his arm in time and held him fast."
"I wanted to see the demon at close quarters," said Michael, quietly.
The forester shrugged his shoulders. "There, your reverence, you see what the fellow is! He runs away from human creatures and such like, but he wants to be right in the midst of things which make every Christian shudder, and cross himself! I really believe he would have joined the phantoms if I had not held him back, and then he would now have been lying dead in the forest, for he who joins the Wild Huntsman's chase is lost."
"Will you never be rid of this sinful superstition, Wolfram?" said the priest. "You pretend to be a Christian, and are nothing better than a heathen. And you have infected Michael, too; his head is full of heathenish legends."
"It may be sinful, but it's true for all that," Wolfram insisted. "I don't suppose you see anything of it. You are a holy man, a consecrated priest, and the ghostly rabble that haunt the forest at night is afraid of you, but the like of us see and hear more of it than is agreeable. Then Michael is to stay here?"