hmidt, and all that he would
resolve upon, and that after much delay, was that, according to the
suggestion of the president, the letter should be sent to Kohlhaas by
Nagelschmidt's man, just as if the fellow was perfectly at liberty, and
that then it should be seen whether Kohlhaas would answer it. The man,
who had been put in prison, was accordingly brought to the seat of
government on the following morning, when the governor of the castle
restored him his letter, and, promising that he should be free, and
exempt from the punishment he had incurred, told him to give it to the
horse-dealer as if nothing had happened. Without more ado, the fellow
lent himself to the mean stratagem, and as if by stealth, entered
Kohlhaas's room on the pretext of selling some crabs, with which the
officer had provided him in the market-place. Kohlhaas, who read the
letter while the children played with the crabs, would certainly, under
the circumstances, have taken the fellow by the collar, and delivered
him up to the soldiers, who stood at his door, but as, in the present
disposition of people towards him, such a step might be interpreted in
more than one way, and he was fully convinced that nothing in the world
could help him out of the difficulty in which he was placed, he looked
mournfully at the fellow's well-known face, asked him where he lived,
and ordered him to come again in an hour or two, when he would
communicate the resolution he had taken with respect to his master. He
told Sternbald, who chanced to enter the room, to buy some crabs of the
fellow he found there, and this having been done, and the two men
having parted without recognition, he sat down and wrote a letter to
Nagelschmidt to the following effect: In the first place he accepted
his offer of the command of the band in Altenburg, and in the next told
him to send him a waggon with two horses to the Neustadt by Dresden, to
free him from the temporary prison in which he was placed with his
children. Two horses more, he said, for the sake of speed would be
wanted on the road to Wittenberg, by which circuitous route, for
certain reasons, too long to specify, he could alone come to him. He
represented the soldiers who guarded him as open to bribery, but
nevertheless, in case force should be necessary, he desired the
presence of a few, stout, active, well-armed fellows in the Neustadt.
To defray the expenses of all these preparations he would send by the
man a _roule