crew before him out of the precincts, then halted
and bent down from his saddle to examine some slight prints in the snow
which led, not the way I had come, but toward what seemed another avenue.
In a second or two the hounds were gathered round this spot, their great
snake-like tails quivering, nose to earth, yelping with excitement. I had
some ado to manage my horse, and my eyesight was far from being as keen as
the baron's, but I had then no doubt he had come already upon wolf tracks,
and I shuddered mentally, thinking of the sleigh bells.

"Suddenly Kossowski raised himself from his strained position; under his
low fur cap his face, with its fixed smile, looked scarcely human in the
white light: and then we broke into a hand canter just as the hounds
dashed, in a compact body, along the trail.

"But we had not gone more than a few hundred yards before they began to
falter, then straggled, stopped and ran back and about with dismal cries.
It was clear to me they had lost the scent. My companion reined in his
horse, and mine, luckily a well-trained brute, halted of himself.

"We had reached a bend in a broad avenue of firs and larches, and just
where we stood, and where the hounds ever returned and met nose to nose in
frantic conclave, the snow was trampled and soiled, and a little farther
on planed in a great sweep, as if by a turning sleigh. Beyond was a
double-furrowed track of skaits and regular hoof prints leading far away.

"Before I had time to reflect upon the bearing of this unexpected
interruption, Kossowski, as if suddenly possessed by a devil, fell upon
the hounds with his whip, flogging them upon the new track, uttering the
while the most savage cries I have ever heard issue from human throat. The
disappointed beasts were nothing loath to seize upon another trail; after
a second of hesitation they had understood, and were off upon it at a
tearing pace, we after them at the best speed of our horses.

"Some unformed idea that we were going to escort, or rescue, benighted
travelers flickered dimly in my mind as I galloped through the night air;
but when I managed to approach my companion and called out to him for
explanation, he only turned half round and grinned at me.

"Before us lay now the white plain, scintillating under the high moon's
rays. That light is deceptive; I could be sure of nothing upon the wide
expanse but of the dark, leaping figures of the hounds already spread out
in a straggling lin