In despair, and rage, and amazement, Will saw him pause there, out of the range of _his_ shot, and yet without an effort being made to secure the fine pair of horns which graced the animal’s head. Will now saw that the Count’s gun was levelled, and that he was apparently pulling at the trigger, but no puff of smoke came out of the barrel. Almost at the same moment the deer must have seen the Count; for all at once he shrank back on his limbs, as if he had been struck, shivered lightly through his entire frame, and then, with a sudden leap, he was off and away out of sight, in the direction of Hermann! In that brief moment of time the Count had taken down his gun, looked at the hammers, found they were on half-cock, cocked them, and put up his gun again; and then, as the deer was just vanishing, bang! bang! went both the barrels. Of course the buck was quite untouched; but the next moment Will heard the sharp crack of a gun in the neighbourhood of Hermann’s post; and he knew what _that_ meant. Even at that distance he could hear the Count breathing out incomprehensible curses at his own stupidity, as he put another couple of cartridges into the barrels. Doubtless, in his excitement, he had been trying so often whether the hammers were on full-cock—pulling at them, letting them down, and so forth—that accidentally they remained at half-cock, and so spoiled for him the easiest shot he was likely to get that day. The silence which had been broken by the report of the guns now fell again over the forest. The sun came out, too; and soon there were straggling lanes of gold running down into the blue twilight of the distance; while the heat seemed to have suddenly awakened a drowsy humming of insect life. Now and then a brightly-plumaged jay would flash through the trees, screaming hoarsely; and then again the same dead, hot stillness prevailed. It was in this perfect silence that a living thing stole out of some short bushes, and softly made its way over the golden and green moss until it caught sight of Will. Then it cocked up its head, and calmly regarded him with a cold, glassy, curious stare. The moment it lifted its head he saw that it was a fox, not reddish-brown, but blackish-grey, with extraordinarily bright eyes; and as they had been specially invited to shoot foxes—which are of no use for hunting purposes, and do much damage, in the Black Forest—he instinctively put up his gun. As instinctively, he put it down again. "My old prejudices are too strong," he said; wherewith he contented himself with lifting a lump of dried wood and hurling it at the small animal, which now slunk away in another direction.