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the ferocity of the dogs, and of the malevolent powers of their master.

The stranger listened, and a ghost of a smile passed across his face, to be instantly repressed. Casually, as if it were a passing thought and a matter of no importance, he suggested that it might be possible that the hermit had a miser's hoard of gold in his little shack on the mountain, and that his apparent poverty was a subterfuge for the purpose of misleading the villagers, while the dogs were purposely kept vicious and his own reputation for supernatural evil powers carefully cultivated purely as a means of insuring undisturbed enjoyment of his hidden wealth.

But no, they said, this could not be; the man was known to have the evil eye. Why, look you, Stanislaus Mathewzewiski, who lived nearest of all the village to the wood, had suddenly come upon the hermit one day face to face just inside the forest, and what had happened? That very night a loose stone on the road had turned under his foot and he had fallen, breaking an arm. And young Hrdlika, who went into the forest with his rifle for a deer, and having wandered farther than he intended—you know what happened to him? Two days later Matilda Czerny, whom he was to have married the following month, ran away to the big city by the sea and married an outsider, a stranger whom she had known for no more than two or three years. Yes, indeed, the hermit had the evil eye, no doubt about it.

As he walked back to his room that night the stranger's ratlike eyes continually sought the black depths of the forest on Chemeketa Mountain, which seemed to hang over the village like a shadow of evil. At his gate he paused and stared long at the summit of the mountain, and then, like one who has come to a definite decision, he nodded his head a couple of times, an ugly light shining in his eyes, then slowly turned and went into the house.

It was two days later that he left his room in the morning, strolling through the village carelessly, as if bound for nowhere in particular, and speaking casually to such of his few acquaintances as he met, until he reached the edge of town. Then he became more circumspect, and was extremely careful that none should see him from there until he plunged into the forest. About sundown, if you had been watching, you might have seen him return, keeping carefully out of sight until well within the village, and returning immediately to his room.

Matt Borlitz, who had a small garden patch on the edge of the village near the forest, came into the post-office the next day with a strange story. He had been aroused about midnight by the frenzied barking of his two fox terriers, and had got up to ascertain the trouble and quiet the dogs. They were on the porch, and as he opened the door they dashed into the house, very evidently in terror of some danger without. Borlitz stepped out on the porch, but at first could see nothing to cause the dogs to act so strangely. As he stared into the darkness, however, three great wolf-dogs suddenly broke out of the forest and passed down the road toward the town. They ran silently, looking neither to the right nor the left; their eyes gleamed like coals of fire, and from where he stood he could see the froth dripping from their slavering jaws as they sped by on their mysterious trail. Borlitz's dogs, ordinarily noisy, fearless animals, cowered and whimpered in apparent abject terror as the spectral figures passed and vanished around a bend in the road.

When he returned to the house Borlitz put the dogs out, much against their will. He heard nothing more from them during the night, but when morning came he found