ch, as he said, had been intrusted to his care and lost through an
accident, he begged them to be so obliging as to ascertain their
present whereabouts, and to urge and admonish the owner, whoever he
might be, to deliver them at the stables of the Chamberlain, Sir Kunz,
in Dresden, and be generously reimbursed for all costs. Accordingly, a
few days later, the man to whom the shepherd in Wilsdruf had sold them
did actually appear with the horses, thin and staggering, tied to the
tailboard of his cart, and led them to the market-place in Dresden. As
the bad luck of Sir Wenzel and still more of honest Kohlhaas would
have it, however, the man happened to be the knacker from Doebeln.

As soon as Sir Wenzel, in the presence of the Chamberlain, his
cousin, learned from an indefinite rumor that a man had arrived in the
city with two black horses which had escaped from the burning of
Tronka Castle, both gentlemen, accompanied by a few servants hurriedly
collected in the house, went to the palace square where the man had
stopped, intending, if the two animals proved to be those belonging to
Kohlhaas, to make good the expenses the man had incurred and take the
horses home with them. But how disconcerted were the knights to see a
momentarily increasing crowd of people, who had been attracted by the
spectacle, already standing around the two-wheeled cart to which the
horses were fastened! Amid uninterrupted laughter they were calling to
one another that the horses, on account of which the whole state was
tottering, already belonged to the knacker! The Squire who had gone
around the cart and gazed at the miserable animals, which seemed every
moment about to expire, said in an embarrassed way that those were not
the horses which he had taken from Kohlhaas; but Sir Kunz, the
Chamberlain, casting at him a look of speechless rage which, had it
been of iron, would have dashed him to pieces, and throwing back his
cloak to disclose his orders and chain, stepped up to the knacker and
asked if those were the black horses which the shepherd at Wilsdruf
had gained possession of, and for which Squire Wenzel Tronka, to whom
they belonged, had made requisition through the magistrate of that
place.

The knacker who, with a pail of water in his hand, was busy watering a
fat, sturdy horse that was drawing his cart asked--"The blacks?" Then
he put down the pail, took the bit out of the horse's mouth, and
explained that the black horses which were tie