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Then he turned his back upon him and, leaving Kohlhaas standing there, returned to Nagelschmidt's followers.
The Chamberlain, who had difficulty in concealing his embarrassment, assured him that, if this piece of paper had any value for him, nothing in the world was more necessary than to conceal the fact from Kohlhaas, for if the latter should receive an indiscreet intimation of it, all the riches the Elector possessed would not be sufficient to buy it from the hands of this vindictive fellow, whose passion for revenge was insatiable.
"Well, then," cried Kohlhaas, "if you feel that, in case I am to continue my trade, justice must be done me, do not deny me the liberty which I must have in order to procure it!" With that he stood up and said to the groom who had come to tell him that the chestnut horse was saddled, "To-morrow the bay horses must be harnessed up to take my wife to Schwerin." Lisbeth said that she had an idea!
For the captain separated his men into several divisions, with the intention of surrounding and crushing Kohlhaas; but the latter, holding his troop together, attacked and beat him at isolated points, so that by the evening of the following day, not a single man of the whole company in which the hopes of the country were centred, remained in the field against him.
Whereupon Kohlhaas called out from the crowd Herse's old mother, whom he had caught sight of in the square, and, giving her the things, said, "Here, grandmother, these belong to you!" The indemnity for the loss of Herse was with the money in the bundle, and this he presented to her also, as a gift to provide care and comfort for her old age.
Kohlhaas, who was occupied in dressing his boys, likewise noticed the commotion and intentionally kept the wagon waiting in front of the house longer than was really necessary. As soon as he saw that the arrangements of the police were completed, without paying any attention to them he came out before the house with his children.
The clerk assured him that the orders of the Governor of the Palace, Baron Wenk, who was at that moment head of the police force, made it his duty to watch over Kohlhaas' person continually, and begged him, if he would not consent to the escort, to go to the Government Office himself so as to correct the mistake which must exist in the matter.
As Kohlhaas descended the steps of the castle, the gouty old housekeeper who managed the Squire's establishment threw herself at his feet. Pausing on the step, he asked her where the Squire Wenzel Tronka was. She answered in a faint trembling voice that she thought he had taken refuge in the chapel.
One, Andreas Vöst , which develops to a magnificent climax the uncompromising rebellion of a stubborn peasant against the superior resources of a malicious priest, with the consequent destruction of the poor victim of his own sense of justice, might be compared with Kleist's masterly narrative Michael Kohlhaas, if in the treatment of the antagonist Kleist's incorruptible objectivity were not lacking and the whole did not, therefore, ultimately turn into pleading for a cause.
Nor can any one describe the confusion which seized all Saxony, and especially the electoral capital, when it was learned there that in all the villages near Leipzig a declaration addressed to Kohlhaas had been placarded, no one knew by whom, to the effect that "Wenzel, the Squire, was with his cousins Hinz and Kunz in Dresden."
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