Kunz.”  With these words he turned around with the rest of the water which the horse had left in the pail, and emptied it out on the pavement.  The Chamberlain, who was beset by the stares of the laughing, jeering crowd and could not induce the fellow, who was attending to his business with phlegmatic zeal, to look at him, said that he was the Chamberlain Kunz Tronka.  The black horses, however, which he was to get possession of, had to be those belonging to the Squire, his cousin; they must have been given to the shepherd at Wilsdruf by a stable-man who had run away from Tronka Castle at the time of the fire; moreover, they must be the two horses that originally had belonged to the horse-dealer Kohlhaas.  He asked the fellow, who was standing there with his legs apart, pulling up his trousers, whether he did not know something about all this.  Had not the swineherd of Hainichen, he went on, perhaps purchased these horses from the shepherd at Wilsdruf, or from a third person, who in turn had bought them from the latter?—­for everything depended on this circumstance.

The knacker replied that he had been ordered to go with the black horses to Dresden and was to receive the money for them in the house of the Tronkas.  He did not understand what the Squire was talking about, and whether it was Peter or Paul, or the shepherd in Wilsdruf, who had owned them before the swineherd in Hainichen, was all one to him so long as they had not been stolen; and with this he went off, with his whip across his broad back, to a public house which stood in the square, with the intention of getting some breakfast, as he was very hungry.

The Chamberlain, who for the life of him didn’t know what he should do with the horses which the swineherd of Hainichen had sold to the knacker of Doebeln, unless they were those on which the devil was riding through Saxony, asked the Squire to say something; but when the latter with white, trembling lips replied that it would be advisable to buy the black horses whether they belonged to Kohlhaas or not, the Chamberlain, cursing the father and mother who had given birth to the Squire, stepped aside out of the crowd and threw back his cloak, absolutely at a loss to know what he should do or leave undone.  Defiantly determined not to leave the square just because the rabble were staring at him derisively and with their handkerchiefs pressed tight over their mouths seemed to be waiting only for him to depart before bursting out into laughter, he called to Baron Wenk, an acquaintance who happened to be riding by, and begged him to stop at the house of the Lord High Chancellor, Count Wrede, and through the latter’s instrumentality to have Kohlhaas brought there to look at the black horses.