Again it was the hunting season, and Dr. Russell would soon come for his autumn holiday. Stead waited for him with more than usual eagerness, being in pitiful want of companionship in which he need no longer play a part that was growing every day more impossible and intolerable. Brooke desired to see the doctor, and learn if possible how far her father’s steady and rational improvement might be trusted; and Miss Keith, remembering some past advice of his, began to feel tremulously that possibly before another visit she might need a fresh instalment, and so resolved to be forehanded. Much game had been let loose during the past few years in the hill country in a sportsmanlike effort to restock it as far as might be, and when this is done there follows the pot-hunter with his snares. Robert Stead, always an enemy of these slouching malefactors of wood and brush lot, had this season announced that he was prepared to give the tribe no quarter. The very day before the doctor’s expected arrival he had covered their shooting grounds quite thoroughly, and after breaking numerous snares, set with the utmost boldness on his own immediate land, he took his gun and ambushed himself at dusk, telling José and two constables, whom he had summoned from the village, to be in readiness to come to him whenever the signal gun was fired, indicating the different routes that they were to take to make a capture the most likely. Sunset came, and another hour passed, when a single report called the watchers; but as they circled in the direction of the sound, they did not meet the flash of Stead’s dark lantern as agreed, and heard no crash of bushes as of men in sudden flight,—nothing but darkness and deep silence. José, the half-breed, bloodhound by nature, with even more of the animal instinct than human intelligence, the outcome of the trailing instinct coupled with much adventure, at once scented calamity. Was the gun the master’s or was it another’s? To him it had a heavy, muffled sound, and besides, it was not the discharge of both barrels, as agreed upon. Returning quickly to the lodge, he seized the lantern and a flask of brandy, and locating the foot-path his master had purposed to take, stole carefully along it, the others following in his wake. Suddenly he paused and lowered the lantern; before him, stretched between two trees, was what is called a foot-snare, a thin, stiff cord, well-nigh invisible, which was fastened across the path between the trees at such a height as to the most surely throw the passer. José cut this with a muttered curse and hurried on. Twenty yards farther he found another; still following the path, his nostrils began to quiver and his eyes to dilate, as if he felt a presence he could not see. A low groan made him bound forward, and he almost fell upon the form of his master, doubled upon the ground, head upon breast, where, in coming up the path, the third snare had thrown him.