as
silent for a while--then he answered, "You are right there, Sir; for a
sulphur cord, which by the will of Providence I was carrying in my
pocket so as to set fire to the robber's nest from which I had been
driven, I threw into the Elbe when I heard a child crying inside the
castle, and I thought to myself, 'Let God's lightning burn it down; I
will not!'"

Kohlhaas was disconcerted. "But for what cause were you driven from
the castle?" he asked.

To this Herse answered, "Something very wrong, Sir," and wiped the
perspiration from his forehead. "What is done, however, can't be
undone. I wouldn't let the horses be worked to death in the fields,
and so I said that they were still young and had never been in
harness."

Kohlhaas, trying to hide his perplexity, answered that he had not told
the exact truth, as the horses had been in harness for a little while
in the early part of the previous spring. "As you were a sort of guest
at the castle," he continued, "you really might have been obliging
once or twice whenever they happened not to have horses enough to get
the crops in as fast as they wished."

"I did so, Sir," said Herse. "I thought, as long as they looked so
sulky about it, that it wouldn't hurt the blacks for once, and so on
the third afternoon I hitched them in front of the others and brought
in three wagon-loads of grain from the fields."

Kohlhaas, whose heart was thumping, looked down at the ground and
said, "They told me nothing about that, Herse!"

Herse assured him that it was so. "I wasn't disobliging save in my
refusal to harness up the horses again when they had hardly eaten
their fill at midday; then too, when the castellan and the steward
offered to give me free fodder if I would do it, telling me to pocket
the money that you had left with me to pay for feed, I answered that I
would do something they didn't bargain for, turned around, and left
them!"

"But surely it was not for that disobliging act that you were driven
away from the castle," said Kohlhaas.

"Mercy, no!" cried the groom. "It was because of a very wicked crime!
For the horses of two knights who came to the castle were put into
the stable for the night and mine were tied to the stable door. And
when I took the blacks from the castellan, who was putting the
knights' horses into my stable, and asked where my animals were to go,
he showed me a pigsty built of laths and boards against the castle
wall."

"You mean," interrupted K