ugh a judge, who was going to Potsdam,
about some affairs of the governor, that the elector had handed over
the petition to his chancellor, Count Kallheim, and that the latter,
instead of going immediately to the court at Dresden to examine the
matter and inflict punishment, as seemed to be his duty, had first
applied for information to Squire von Tronka himself. The judge,[3]
who stopped in his carriage before Kohlhaas's door, and who seemed to
have been expressly commissioned to make this communication, could give
no satisfactory answer to the question of his surprise: "But why did
they act in this way?" he merely said, that the governor had sent word,
begging him to be patient, appeared anxious to pursue his journey, and
it was not till the end of a short conversation, that Kohlhaas learned
by a few stray words, that Count Kallheim was related by marriage to
the von Tronka's. Kohlhaas, who no longer took any delight in
attending his horses, or in his house and farm--scarcely in his wife
and children--waited the arrival of the following month with the
gloomiest misgivings, and it was quite in accordance with his
expectations, that when the interval was passed, Herse, who had been in
some measure relieved by the bath, returned from Brandenburg with a
letter from the governor, accompanying a paper of larger dimensions.
The letter was to the effect that the writer was sorry he could do
nothing for him, but that he sent him a decree of the chancery, and
advised him to take away the horses, which he had left at Tronkenburg,
and let the whole matter drop. According to the decree, "he was a
vexatious litigant, on the information of the tribunal at Dresden; the
squire with whom he had left the horses did nothing to detain them; he
might send to the castle and fetch them, or at any rate let the squire
know where he was to send them, and at all events he was to abstain
from troubling the court with such wranglings." Kohlhaas, to whom the
horses were not the chief object--had it been a couple of dogs he would
have been equally mortified--literally foamed with rage when he had
received this letter. Whenever there was a noise in his farm, he
looked with the sickening sensation which had even stirred his heart
towards the gate, expecting to see the squire's servants, with his
horses starved and worn out; this was the only case in which his mind,
otherwise well-trained by the world, could find nothing that exactly
corresponded w