taves, cared nothing for these words.
After handling rather roughly some councilors who were insisting upon
the adoption of vigorous measures, the mob was about to storm the
house where the Squire was and level it to the ground, when the
Governor, Otto von Gorgas, appeared in the city at the head of his
troopers. This worthy gentleman, who was wont by his mere presence to
inspire people to respectful obedience, had, as though in compensation
for the failure of the expedition from which he was returning,
succeeded in taking prisoner three stray members of the incendiary's
band, right in front of the gates of the city. While the prisoners
were being loaded with chains before the eyes of the people, he made a
clever speech to the city councilors, assuring them that he was on
Kohlhaas' track and thought that he would soon be able to bring the
incendiary himself in chains. By force of all these reassuring
circumstances he succeeded in allaying the fears of the assembled
crowd and in partially reconciling them to the presence of the Squire
until the return of the courier from Dresden. He dismounted from his
horse and, accompanied by some knights, entered the house after the
posts and stockades had been cleared away. He found the Squire, who
was falling from one faint into another, in the hands of two doctors,
who with essences and stimulants were trying to restore him to
consciousness. As Sir Otto von Gorgas realized that this was not the
moment to exchange any words with him on the subject of the behavior
of which he had been guilty, he merely told him, with a look of quiet
contempt, to dress himself, and, for his own safety, to follow him to
the apartments of the knight's prison. They put a doublet and a helmet
on the Squire and when, with chest half bare on account of the
difficulty he had in breathing, he appeared in the street on the arm
of the Governor and his brother-in-law, the Count of Gerschau,
blasphemous and horrible curses against him rose to heaven. The mob,
whom the lansquenets found it very difficult to restrain, called him a
bloodsucker, a miserable public pest and a tormentor of men, the curse
of the city of Wittenberg, and the ruin of Saxony. After a wretched
march through the devastated city, in the course of which the Squire's
helmet fell off several times without his missing it and had to be
replaced on his head by the knight who was behind him, they reached
the prison at last, where he disappeared into a