"You were obliged to supply her with clothes, I understand?"
"Yes," answered Engelbert, his natural loquacity getting the upper hand. "I found her lying on the doorstep with scarcely a rag to her back. She was dead beat. I got up in the night to see what the dogs were barking at."
"Two o'clock in the morning. Here is a sound rafter. We can use that.... She ran the twenty miles in seven hours. I should never have thought it possible; she lay like an otter that has been shot down--so straight and fair--and gasped for breath. Your sheet of paper she clung to with both hands. She tried to stand up, but fell backwards. Then I fetched her brandy, rubbed her temples, and gave her----"
One of his companions who were following behind, now came up, and gave him such a look of astonishment and reproach that he broke off in the middle of a sentence.
For the next few hours an industrious sawing and hammering proceeded from the Castle island, which sounds fell disagreeably on the ears of the fierce and much perturbed Schrandeners on the opposite bank of the river. It seemed to portend that their nicely-laid plans were at the last moment to be frustrated.
Old Hackelberg appeared in the street with his gun, which, as a rule, lay buried in a dung-heap, because he was afraid that it might be taken away from him, as had once happened when he amused himself by shooting bats in the market-place, declaring that they followed him in swarms wherever he went. With this famous gun he used in old days to go out poaching every night, but since his once unerring hand had become weak and tremulous from drink, he had been obliged to give up the trade. Only when he had drunk even more than usual did the old sporting instinct rise strongly within him, and he would rush to the shed, unearth his gun, and bring down a swallow in full flight through the air.
Now he was on the war-path, and with the babbling rhetoric peculiar to him, shouted--
"Schrandeners, duty calls! Arm yourselves against the traitors. I am an unhappy father. Robbed of my child. I'll shoot him dead, the brute."
"Is he? Well, it doesn't matter--the other must be shot--all must be shot down."
Meanwhile Felix Merckel was ramping about the parlour of the Black Eagle like a bull of Bashan. He remembered enough about the Heide youths to know that when once irritated or attacked they would go any length. The inevitable result of offering them opposition would be such bloodshed as the rioters outside had no conception of. And then--what then? Would not he as ringleader be the first object on which the wrath of the outraged law would expend itself?