Page:Selected Czech tales - 1925.djvu/255

 He took aim at the hands and shot.

‘Jesus Mary!’

There was a terrified cry of a tormented human being. Martin the forester jumped into the thick undergrowth. The boughs were lashing his face, he had difficulty in making headway.

He pentratedpenetrated [sic] to the spot where the trap had been laid; he hoped to find Flandara at the point of death, but he found—nothing. He looked for a track and found bloodstained moss, and a trail of blood which stopped abruptly. He beat about the undergrowth in every direction without coming upon any one.

He spent the whole morning in the woods, impatient, annoyed, disappointed. He grew more and more dissatisfied with himself, he could not say why.

His desire had been to hurt, wound, cripple a human being. He had nursed this desire the whole morning, had hardly been able to bide his time. Then he had had his quarry at bay, had wounded a man who had lost so much blood that he was likely to bleed to death somewhere in the bushes; his lust for blood and murder had been satisfied. And now his teeth were