'Alas! why have you let him go, my Countess!' murmured Otto, the head forester.
'The Kaiser had made him sacred,' she answered, with a smile; and then she called Donau and Neva, who were roaming, and went on her way through her forest.
'What strange and cruel creatures we are!' she thought. 'The vulture would have dropped into the ravine. He would never have found it. The audacity, too, to fire on a kuttengeier; if it had been any lesser bird one might have pardoned it.'
For the eagle, the gypæte, the white-throated pygargue, the buzzard, and all the family of falcons were held sacred at Hohenszalras, and lived in their mountain haunts rarely troubled. It was an old law there that the great winged monarchs should never be chased, except by the Kaiser himself when he came there. So that the crime of the stranger had been more than trespass and almost treason! Her heart was hard to him, and she felt that she had been too lenient. Who could tell but that that rifle would bring down some free lord of the air?
She listened with the keen ear of one used to the solitude of the hills and woods; she thought he would shoot something out of bravado. But all was silent in that green defile beneath whose boughs the stranger was wending on his way. She listened long, but she heard no shots, although in those still heights the slightest noise echoed from a hundred walls of rock and ice. She walked onward through the deep shadow of the thick growing beeches; she had her alpenstock in her right hand, her little silver horn hung at her belt, and beside it was a pair of small ivory pistols, pretty as toys, but deadly as revolvers could be. She stooped here and there to gather some lilies of the valley, which were common enough in these damp grassy glades.
'Where could that stranger have come from, Otto?' she asked of her jäger.
'He must have come over the Hündspitz, my Countess,' said Otto. 'Any other way he would have been stopped by our men and lightened of his rifle.'
'The Hündspitz!' she echoed, in wonder, for the mountain so called was a wild inaccessible place, divided by a parapet of ice all the year round from the range of the Gross Glöckner.
'That must he,' said the huntsman,'and for sure if an honest man had tried to come that way he would have been hurled headlong down the ice-wall——'
'He is the Kaiser's protégé, Otto,' said his mistress, with a smile, but the old jäger muttered that they had only his own word for that. It had pierced Otto's soul to let the poacher's rifle go.