Still no answer, and the Overseer thought he detected in the faces of the other peasants something like a grin. His temper at the best was not angelic, and this suspicion proved too much for him.
“By G——, I’ll teach you how to talk,” and before the astonished peasant could lift a hand to defend himself, down came the blackthorn on his shoulders with a rapidity that showed that the Overseer was well versed in the argumentum baculinum. Instead of answering, the peasant rushed to the nearest hay waggon, and crying out some word in German, thrust his hand into the hay, drew out a loaded musket, aimed at the Overseer, fired point blank and missed. A blow of the blackthorn sent the peasant down. In the meantime others of the peasants had crowded round the Overseer, who, while with every blow he felled an assailant, kept crying, “To arms, to arms!”
But suddenly the hay was swept from the waggons, and from each a number of armed men sprang out. The Overseer, unable to withstand so many foes, having succeeded in getting round one of the carts, made a rush for the sedge on the river.
The enemy, in an excess of folly, fired at the sedge, and the bullets whizzed through it, cutting it just above his head, but the report of the muskets was heard through the town, and the whole garrison turned out. A rush was made for the gate, inside of which there were now some hundreds of the enemy. The Overseer, seeing the troops coming out, quitted his retreat and joined them, and threw himself into the midst of the desperate hand-to-hand conflict, in which both sides were at once engaged. Many a stout German went down with a cracked skull before the wielder of the blackthorn. At length, after a stubborn resistance, the enemy were driven out and pursued some distance, the Governor of Freiburg covering their retreat with the cavalry. They left behind them nearly two hundred dead, including the Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment of Osanbruch and the Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment of Bayreuth, and several majors and captains.
Bad news travels fast, but the Governor of Freiburg determined that he himself would be the bearer of it to the Prince. It was an unpleasant task, but he thought it better that he should be the first to carry it, so that rumour might have no time to make out a worse case against him than his conduct of the affair warranted.
On the following day he found the Prince alone, as on the former occasion, and in the same apartment.