They had now reached the edge of the forest, and here Hermann called the party around him, and gave his orders in a loud peremptory tone, which had the effect of considerably frightening his master; the Count hoped that he would do nothing inaccurate.
"You, Herr Schulmeister, will accompany the drivers, and Spiegelmann will give you one of the return-posts. Falz, you will go down to the new-cut road—Greef on your right, Beigel further along. Spiegelmann will sound his horn when you are all posted, and the second horn when the drive commences. Forward, then, in God’s name, all of us!"
And away trooped the lads under the surveillance of the venerable Spiegelmann, who had a couple of brace of leashed beagles pulling and straining and whining to get free into the brushwood. Hermann, Will, and the Count at once dived into the twilight of the tall pines, that almost shut out the red flames of the morning over their peaks. The soft, succulent yellow moss was heavy with dew, and so were the ferns and the stoneberry bushes. A dense carpet of this low brushwood deadened the sound of their progress; and they advanced, silent as phantoms, into the dim recesses of the wood. Here and there occurred an opening or clearance, with a few felled trees lying about; then they struggled through a wilderness of younger fir and oak, and finally came into a tract of the forest where nothing was to be seen, as far as the eye could reach, but innumerable tall trunks, coated with the yellow and grey lichens of many years, branchless almost to their summit, and rising from a level plain of damp green moss. There was not even the sound of a bird, or of a falling leaf, to break the intense silence of the place; nor was there the shadow of any living thing to be seen down those long narrow avenues between the closely-growing stems of the trees.
"Count Schönstein," said Will, in a whisper, as they drew near the Haupt-platz, "what gun is that you have with you?"
"I should think so. Shoots hard and close as a rifle."
"Hermann," said Will, turning to the head-keeper, "I insist on being posted eighty yards distant from the Count."
"You think that is a joke," said the Count peevishly.
"I don’t think it a joke at all," said Will. "Breech-loaders have a wonderful faculty of going off when nobody expects them; and though you may explain the thing satisfactorily afterwards, that won’t remove a few buck-shot out of your leg."