A famous law suit, in the days of his grandfather, had
wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty
landowners; the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment
of the Courts, and a long series of poaching affrays and similar scandals
had embittered the relationships between the families for three
generations. The neighbour feud had grown into a personal one since
Ulrich had come to be head of his family; if there was a man in the world
whom he detested and wished ill to it was Georg Znaeym, the inheritor of
the quarrel and the tireless game-snatcher and raider of the disputed
border-forest. The feud might, perhaps, have died down or been
compromised if the personal ill-will of the two men had not stood in the
way; as boys they had thirsted for one another's blood, as men each
prayed that misfortune might fall on the other, and this wind-scourged
winter night Ulrich had banded together his foresters to watch the dark
forest, not in quest of four-footed quarry, but to keep a look-out for
the prowling thieves whom he suspected of being afoot from across the
land boundary. The roebuck, which usually kept in the sheltered hollows
during a storm-wind, were running like driven things to-night, and there
was movement and unrest among the creatures that were wont to sleep
through the dark hours.
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