d to the tailboard of
the cart had been sold to him by the swineherd in Hainichen; where the
latter had obtained them and whether they came from the shepherd at
Wilsdruf--that he did not know. "He had been told," he continued,
taking up the pail again and propping it between the pole of the cart
and his knee "he had been told by the messenger of the court at
Wilsdruf to take the horses to the house of the Tronkas in Dresden,
but the Squire to whom he had been directed was named Kunz." With
these words he turned around with the rest of the water which the
horse had left in the pail, and emptied it out on the pavement. The
Chamberlain, who was beset by the stares of the laughing, jeering
crowd and could not induce the fellow, who was attending to his
business with phlegmatic zeal, to look at him, said that he was the
Chamberlain Kunz Tronka. The black horses, however, which he was to
get possession of, had to be those belonging to the Squire, his
cousin; they must have been given to the shepherd at Wilsdruf by a
stable-man who had run away from Tronka Castle at the time of the
fire; moreover, they must be the two horses that originally had
belonged to the horse-dealer Kohlhaas. He asked the fellow, who was
standing there with his legs apart, pulling up his trousers, whether
he did not know something about all this. Had not the swineherd of
Hainichen, he went on, perhaps purchased these horses from the
shepherd at Wilsdruf, or from a third person, who in turn had bought
them from the latter?--for everything depended on this circumstance.

The knacker replied that he had been ordered to go with the black
horses to Dresden and was to receive the money for them in the house
of the Tronkas. He did not understand what the Squire was talking
about, and whether it was Peter or Paul, or the shepherd in Wilsdruf,
who had owned them before the swineherd in Hainichen, was all one to
him so long as they had not been stolen; and with this he went off,
with his whip across his broad back, to a public house which stood in
the square, with the intention of getting some breakfast, as he was
very hungry.

The Chamberlain, who for the life of him didn't know what he should do
with the horses which the swineherd of Hainichen had sold to the
knacker of Doebeln, unless they were those on which the devil was
riding through Saxony, asked the Squire to say something; but when
the latter with white, trembling lips replied that it would be
advisa