Free The Sound of His Horn by Sarban

more a ride, or alley, than a glade, for the opposite side was a continuous thick hedge of bushes, looking natural enough to the eye, but no doubt layered and interlaced artificially in order to confine the game to the ride and force it to run straight past the butt within easy range. We were in a valley, and the ride, running lengthwise up it, ended where the ground sloped up more steeply and the sides of the valley, walled there with steep grey rocks, converged and appeared to meet or to leave only a very narrow pass between their crags. It was clear that any game being driven up the valley along this ride or others, if it escaped the guns posted oh them, must be stopped by the converging cliffs and either driven back again, past the guns, or shot by keepers stationed at the head of the valley. We had a clear view of a large part of that triangle formed by the cliffs, for the trees grew only thinly there. In the other direction, from which the game must come, the ride ran straight for perhaps a hundred yards, so that the guns would see the buck in ample time to be able to fire deliberately when it came in range.
    It wanted only tame deer to make the worst shooter's success a certainty. And, having looked at the principal occupant of the butt I guessed that that was mainly the type of guest the Reich Master Forester had to cater to.
    He was a short, grossly fat man in a pair of new
lederhosen,
with fancy braces, white stockings and an embroidered shirt. He was almost bald, square-headed and heavy-jowled; a thick roll of fat bulged over his shirt collar at the back of his neck and he had a stern on him like a canal barge. I could not have imagined a more absurd contrast to the three or four young foresters who occupied the butt with him: they so trim and fit-looking, dressed richly in their greens and golds, but most serviceably for the forest. The pale puffiness of his legs and arms, contrasted with their sunburned hardness, made him look like a different species of creature.
    He turned his head as we came into the butt from the back, giving us a blinking, uncomprehending glance through rimless spectacles, then resumed his watch on the glade again. He was seated before one of the gaps in the bushes, on a folding stool whose seat disappeared under the shining curves of his leather shorts, and leaning against the turfed bank beside him were two or three guns--one of them of the very large-bore pattern I had seen in the Schloss. At the next loop-hole stood a forester with a crossbow, keeping a careful eye both on the glade and on the guest.
    Von Eichbrunn and I retired to the back of the butt, where he was greeted in whispers by the other foresters. There, on a broad divan of turf, surrounded by comforting flasks and capacious ice-containers, under a tent of green leaves, the Doctor reclined at ease and I had leisure to observe what was going on.
    The guest had had some sport already, for a fallow-buck, newly gralloched, hung from the bough of a birch tree. He had evidently had more practise than game, for I could see three or four empty cartridge cases lying on the turf behind him. His companions were getting their share, also; for at short intervals we heard the brief baying of a hound and shots at varying distances from us beyond the long thicket that bounded our view across the valley.
    Our own man seemed to be getting bored. He took out a cigar case and was about to light up when the forester in charge made a sign. The guest's loader handed him his gun and respectfully turned him in the right direction. The boy next to me nudged me and, rising, showed me where I could look over the bank and have a fair view down the glade. A couple of hounds were giving tongue, hunting in our direction; then a red-deer stag came into sight, running easily up the valley. He stopped fifty yards from the butt, a little suspicious, but after snuffing and shaking his head, came on again at a trot, passing at a range of twenty yards from our