I got my cloak and wrapped it around myself, and we left. The village was asleep by now; the only light came from the parlor window of the inn, and as I looked back even that wavered and died away. Old Conrad was closing the bar.

The walk up to the woodcutter’s hut took the best part of an hour. Max talked cheerfully at first, but even he couldn’t keep it up for long; and tiredness, and apprehension, too, soon got the better of me. In the end we trudged along in silence, with only the crunch of our footsteps in the snow and the occasional cry of an owl breaking the vast quiet of the forest.

When we were nearly there, I stopped and looked around carefully. There was a path that led off to the left, but you wouldn’t see it unless you knew where to look. I could see the flicker of a small fire as we shoved our way through the dense bushes and the snowy undergrowth, and then we were there.

But no one else was. The place was deserted.

“Where’s she gone?” said Max.

“They can’t have left very long ago or the fire would have gone out,” I said. “These logs are fresh—look, they haven’t been burning long.”

Max took a burning stick out of the fire and, holding it like a torch, put his head inside the hut.

“No one in there,” he said when he came out, “but all her things are there—that little cart of hers and her tent and so on—” He held the stick high and looked around.

And then, without any warning, a shot rang out from the trees, very close—so close I could see the flash of the powder at the same time as I heard the noise. And the stick Max was holding flew out of his hand and went spinning, like a firework, through the air behind him, and fell into the stream with a hiss. Then, in the ringing silence that followed, I heard very distinctly the sound of a little click. My brother, Peter, was a hunter; I’d heard guns since I was a baby, and I knew that sound well. It was the noise a hammer made, when it was raised to strike against the flint of a pistol. Whoever had fired the first shot was preparing to fire another; and he couldn’t have wished for better targets than Max and me.

Miss Augusta Davenport’s Narrative continued