any words with him on the subject of the behavior of which he had been guilty, he merely told him, with a look of quiet contempt, to dress himself, and, for his own safety, to follow him to the apartments of the knight’s prison.  They put a doublet and a helmet on the Squire and when, with chest half bare on account of the difficulty he had in breathing, he appeared in the street on the arm of the Governor and his brother-in-law, the Count of Gerschau, blasphemous and horrible curses against him rose to heaven.  The mob, whom the lansquenets found it very difficult to restrain, called him a bloodsucker, a miserable public pest and a tormentor of men, the curse of the city of Wittenberg, and the ruin of Saxony.  After a wretched march through the devastated city, in the course of which the Squire’s helmet fell off several times without his missing it and had to be replaced on his head by the knight who was behind him, they reached the prison at last, where he disappeared into a tower under the protection of a strong guard.  Meanwhile the return of the courier with the decree of the Elector had aroused fresh alarm in the city.  For the Saxon government, to which the citizens of Dresden had made direct application in an urgent petition, refused to permit the Squire to sojourn in the electoral capital before the incendiary had been captured.  The Governor was instructed rather to use all the power at his command to protect the Squire just where he was, since he had to stay somewhere, but in order to pacify the good city of Wittenberg, the inhabitants were informed that a force of five hundred men under the command of Prince Friedrich of Meissen was already on the way to protect them from further molestation on the part of Kohlhaas.

The Governor saw clearly that a decree of this kind was wholly inadequate to pacify the people.  For not only had several small advantages gained by the horse-dealer in skirmishes outside the city sufficed to spread extremely disquieting rumors as to the size to which his band had grown; his way of waging warfare with ruffians in disguise who slunk about under cover of darkness with pitch, straw, and sulphur, unheard of and quite without precedent as it was, would have rendered ineffectual an even larger protecting force than the one which was advancing under the Prince of Meissen.  After reflecting a short time, the Governor determined therefore to suppress altogether the decree he had received; he merely posted at all the street corners a letter from the Prince of Meissen, announcing his arrival.  At daybreak a covered wagon left the courtyard of the knight’s prison and took the road to Leipzig, accompanied by four heavily armed troopers who, in an indefinite sort of way, let it be understood that they were bound for the Pleissenburg.  The people having thus been satisfied on the subject of the ill-starred Squire, whose existence seemed identified with fire and sword, the Governor himself set out with a force of three