Volna got it and handed it to him.
“The woman shall drink it now,” he declared. But the old hag swore that it was we who had made the coffee, not she; and that we had tried to rob her.
“Why should we wish to rob a woodcutter,” I asked. I had his ear now and he began to have a glimmer of reason. “Besides, our horses are outside in the shed.”
“They are our horses,” asserted the woman.
“Go and look at them. See if a woodcutter, just a week here from Silesia, as she says, would possess two such animals and saddles. One is a side saddle, too.”
He sent his man out; and sat silent. Matters were going better, so I left him to absorb the points I had made.
“Will you drink that coffee?” he asked the woman suddenly, very sternly.
“Why should I drink the poison we refused before?” she cried, and pointing her scraggy finger at Volna added: “She made it, let her drink it.”
“You see,” I said; and he nodded in agreement.
Then his man came back and reported that the horses were two good ones and that the saddles were soaked as if they had been exposed to the fury of the storm; thus bearing out my story.