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them both dead, their throats torn out and their bodies mangled.

This was the first of three nights of terror for the village. It was the next night after Borlitz's dogs were killed that Katrina, the little twelve-year-old daughter of Thaddeus Polonski, left the house about 9 o'clock to go to the spring, about fifty yards down the road, to draw a bucket of water against its use in the morning. She was gone a little longer than usual, and then came dashing back to the house, hysterical with terror.

She told how she had drawn the water and was just leaving the spring when three great beasts came rushing down out of the forest. As she crouched, terror-stricken, in the shadow of the little shed over the spring, they rushed silently down the road toward the town and disappeared. The child was too frightened to move from her hiding-place for a time, until she finally mustered up sufficient courage to run across the open space between the spring and the house, arriving breathless with fear, and sobbed out her story to her father.

The next morning Serge Hrdlika, who was the father of the young man whose love affair had terminated so unhappily, and who lived about a hundred yards down the road, found a week-old Holstein calf dead in front of his house, killed in much the same manner as had been Borlitz's dogs the night before.

The men of the village met at the grocery store the next day to see what, if anything, could be done about it. It was pretty generally believed that they must be the hermit's dogs, suddenly taken to straying farther afield than had been their custom. True, he was only known to have two, but it was not impossible that he had recently acquired a third.

A great deal of talk was indulged in, and Borlitz, Polonski, and Hrdlika were especially anxious for something to be done, but the meeting broke up without anything being accomplished when it developed that no one was willing to run the risk of calling on the hermit for the purpose of persuading him to restrain his dogs.

It was that evening, just before dusk, that the second stranger arrived. He was a big, determined-looking chap, with an indefinable something in his appearance that caused Gorgas Pichutzki, the town toper, to hasten home at his first glimpse of the newcomer and bury in a deep hole in his radish patch the gallon jug of hard cider which he had kept in his kitchen. It seemed safer to take no chances.

But the stranger was apparently not interested in Pichutzki's cider or its age or potency. He immediately sought the grocery store, and in the back room held a short conference with Jan Chezik, the proprietor, who was also postmaster and town constable. During the conversation he exhibited certain papers which apparently gained him considerable respect on the part of Jan. He also showed that gentlemen two photographs; they were a full face and profile view of the rat-faced stranger, and at the bottom of each picture was a number.

When he stepped out on the street again the newcomer proceeded directly to Mrs. Sczura's, where he inquired for her roomer. The good woman informed him that the man he sought was out, but would surely return shortly, and would he care to wait? He would, he replied grimly. And he did, in Mrs. Sczura's "sitting-room."

Now, it so happened that just about the time he stood at Mrs. Sczura's door, the man for whom he was asking was coming up the street to the house. When he saw his landlady's visitor, he cursed under his breath, and immediately effaced himself from the