‘You would put your hand in the fire for him to-morrow,’ said Kuno, facing round.
‘Me!’ cried the huntsman. ‘I would see him hanged! I’m a Grünewald patriot—enrolled, and have my medal, too; and I would help a prince! I’m for liberty and Gondremark.’
‘Well, it’s all one,’ said Kuno. ‘If anybody said what you said, you would have his blood, and you know it.’
‘You have him on the brain,’ retorted his companion. ‘There he goes!’ he cried, the next moment.
And sure enough, about a mile down the mountain, a rider on a white horse was seen to flit rapidly across a heathy open and vanish among the trees on the farther side.
‘In ten minutes he’ll be over the border into Gerolstein,’ said Kuno. ‘It’s past cure.’
‘Well, if he founders that mare, I’ll never forgive him,’ added the other, gathering his reins.
And as they turned down from the knoll to rejoin their comrades, the sun dipped and disappeared, and the woods fell instantly into the gravity and greyness of the early night.
CHAPTER II—IN WHICH THE PRINCE PLAYS HAROUN-AL-RASCHID
The night fell upon the Prince while he was threading green tracks in the lower valleys of the wood; and though the stars came out overhead and displayed the interminable order of the pine-tree pyramids, regular and dark like cypresses, their light was of small service to a traveller in such lonely paths, and from thenceforth he rode at random. The austere face of nature, the uncertain issue of his course, the open sky and the free air, delighted him like wine; and the hoarse chafing of a river on his left sounded in his ears agreeably.