red Kohlhaas to a
celebrated lawyer in the city who was a member of the Tribunal, so
that he might have the complaint drawn up and presented immediately.

Kohlhaas, without further delay, betook himself to the lawyer's house
and had the suit drawn up exactly like the original one which had been
quashed. He demanded the punishment of the Squire according to law,
the restoration of the horses to their former condition, and
compensation for the damages he had sustained as well as for those
suffered by his groom, Herse, who had fallen at Muehlberg in behalf of
the latter's old mother. When this was done Kohlhaas returned home,
accompanied by the crowd that still continued to gape at him, firmly
resolved in his mind not to leave the house again unless called away
by important business.

In the mean time the Squire had been released from his imprisonment in
Wittenberg, and after recovering from a dangerous attack of erysipelas
which had caused inflammation of his foot, had been summoned by the
Supreme Court in peremptory terms to present himself in Dresden to
answer the suit instituted against him by the horse-dealer, Kohlhaas,
with regard to a pair of black horses which had been unlawfully taken
from him and worked to death. The Tronka brothers, the Chamberlain and
the Cup-bearer, cousins of the Squire, at whose house he alighted,
received him with the greatest bitterness and contempt. They called
him a miserable good-for-nothing, who had brought shame and disgrace
on the whole family, told him that he would inevitably lose his suit,
and called upon him to prepare at once to produce the black horses,
which he would be condemned to fatten to the scornful laughter of the
world. The Squire answered in a weak and trembling voice that he was
more deserving of pity than any other man on earth. He swore that he
had known but little about the whole cursed affair which had plunged
him into misfortune, and that the castellan and the steward were to
blame for everything, because they, without his knowledge or consent,
had used the horses in getting in the crops and, by overworking them,
partly in their own fields, had rendered them unfit for further use.
He sat down as he said this and begged them not to mortify and insult
him and thus wantonly cause a relapse of the illness from which he had
but recently recovered.

Since there was nothing else to be done, the next day, at the request
of their cousin, the Squire, the lords Hinz and