"_Our gracious Baron and Lord Of Schrandeners' souls abhorr'd. For the shame he's brought on our head, O God, let the plague strike him dead._"
"Well, in a fashion their prayer has been answered. The betrayer of their country, who never tired of cursing and damning them up hill and down dale, and heaped on them every foul epithet he could lay tongue to, may now lie and rot in a ditch for all they care. They have sworn not to bury him."
Then arose excited shouts and eager questioning.
"Has the devil taken him to himself at last? Ha! ha! Bravo!"
Suddenly, above the din of voices, a grinding crunching noise was heard. Baumgart's arm had clasped the back of his chair with such vehemence that the long-suffering worm-eaten wood had collapsed. He sat rigid and motionless, staring at the speaker with wide, strained eyes, unconscious of the injury he had inflicted on the ancestral piece of furniture. Then garrulous Johann Radtke proceeded--
"Yes, happily enough, they were the cause of his death at last. They have never ceased to harass and torment him, and it was while they were trying to demolish the Cats' Bridge that he had a stroke of apoplexy from rage, and fell down foaming at the mouth."
"Lieutenant, have you ever heard of the Cats' Bridge?"
Still he neither moved nor uttered a word; only set his teeth on his under lip, till it bled. As if turned to stone, he sat gazing fixedly up into the speaker's face.
"It was by the Cats' Bridge that the French made the famous, or rather I should say infamous, sortie which surprised the Prussians, and it was the Baron who showed them the secret path which leads to it. You have heard of the Schranden invasion, of course. It's recorded in every calendar?"
The lieutenant nodded mechanically like a doomed man, who, swooning, resigns himself to inevitable fate.
"The stroke took him before their very eyes," Radtke went on. "His precious sweetheart, the village carpenter's daughter, the baggage who lived with him, you know, threw herself on his body, for the Lord only knows what liberties they might not have taken with it when their blood was up."
"And now they refuse to bury him, you say?" interrupted the good-natured Karl Engelbert, shaking his head meditatively. "Is such a scandalous outrage as that allowed to pass unpunished in a Christian country?"