'I know nothing of Hohenszalras!' he interrupted, with impatience.
She blew a whistle, and her head forester with three jägers sprang up as if out of the earth, some great wolf-hounds, grinning with their fangs, waiting but a word to spring. In one second the rangers had thrown themselves on the too audacious trespasser, had pinioned him, and had taken his rifle.
Confounded, disarmed, humiliated, and stunned by the suddenness of the attack, he stood mute and very pale.
'You know Hohenszalras now!' said the mistress of it, with a smile, as she watched his seizure seated on a moss-grown boulder of granite, black Donau and white Neva by her side. He was pale with impotent fury, conscious of an indefensible and absurd position. The jäger looked at their mistress; they had slipped a cord over his wrists, and tied them behind his back; they looked to her for a sign of assent to break his rifle. She stood silent, amused with her victory and his chastisement; a little derision shining in her lustrous eyes.
'You know Hohenszalras now!' she said once more. 'Men have been shot dead for what you were doing. If you be, indeed, a friend of my Emperor's, of course you are welcome here; but——'
'What right have you to offer me this indignity,' muttered the offender, his fair features changing from white to red, and red to white, in his humiliation and discomfiture.
'Right!' echoed the mistress of the forests. 'I have the right to do anything I please with you! You seem to me to understand but little of forest laws.'
'Madame, were you not a woman, you would have had bloodshed.'
'Oh, very likely. That sometimes happens, although seldom, as all the Hohe Tauern knows how strictly these forests are preserved. My men are looking to me for permission to break your rifle. That is the law, sir.'
'Since 'Forty-eight,' said the trespasser, with what seemed to her marvellous insolence, 'all the old forest laws are null and void. It is scarcely allowable to talk of trespass.'