"Let me alone! Let me alone!" she shrieked. "I'll find him yet—he won't get away from me a second time!"
Terror seized me anew. I shuddered, and pressed as closely as possible into my mossy bed.
Then the hags began to arrange their plans for the next day. They would send the "Bocksritter" to attack a caravan that was coming to Antwerp.
I had heard a good deal about the Bocksritter, a mounted band of ferocious robbers, who looked like satyrs, and were in league with Satan. They were even more to be dreaded than the Haidemaken. When the satyrs committed an extensive robbery, they took good care not to let a single one of their victims escape alive—not even the infant in its cradle. They left no one to witness against them; and, as they fled at once to another country, it was impossible to learn anything about them. Where they committed their depredations and the officers of the law failed to find trace of them, it was concluded, and naturally, that the Bocksritter were a myth, and the story of their depredations an idle fable.
When the witches had decided their plans for the next day, the most hideous of the hideous crew began to peer about her, and sniff the air.
"I smell something!" she exclaimed; "something that doesn't belong here."
"It smells like a human being," said a second, also sniffing around her.
"Ha, if only it were the fellow who escaped me this morning!" with a snort exclaimed a third. "It wouldn't take me long to prepare him for a bridle"—she glanced as she concluded toward the pallid creatures hanging on the trees.
I pressed still further into the moss and ferns; but the raven on my shoulder began to flutter his wings, as if to attract the witches' attention.
"Some one is hiding over yonder!" they cried as with one voice. "Come on, sisters, let's tickle him!"