The proposed duel was likewise sanctioned, but not under the conditions proposed by Kahle. Perhaps it was feared that a fatal ending to the duel, such as the very stringent conditions seemed to make almost unavoidable, would raise too much dust. For quite recently there had been several cases of a similar nature, and the death of one of the duellists had had the most disagreeable consequences for those high-commanding officers who had neither attempted to modify the conditions of combat nor endeavored to bring about reconciliation.
Thus it was that the new terms of the challenge were: thirty-five paces distance and one exchange of bullets; ordinary pistols.
Kahle, then, was to be given no opportunity to punish as he deserved the disturber of his domestic peace, because superior officers did not wish to bring unpleasant consequences upon themselves; for the duel, as now arranged for under these altered terms, he regarded as a mere farce, and a possible fatal issue could be nothing but the work of blind accident.
Borgert had been requested by Kolberg to serve as his second, and the former readily agreed to this; for on the one hand he liked to play the rôle of an onlooker in such an affair, and on the other he deemed it prudent to put Kolberg under a new obligation; all the more as the repaying of his loans seemed as far off as ever.
On the eve of his leaving for that city in South Germany where the meeting was to take place, Kolberg once more assembled his faithful admirers in his quiet little garden-house. His invitations had been for a banquet, washed down with some of his choicest wines. The drinking on that occasion was so hard that Kolberg himself became completely intoxicated, and when his guests left he was snoring in a drunken stupor on his lounge. The train left early, and Kolberg’s man had a hard task in rousing his master sufficiently at the proper time to hastily prepare him for his long journey.
Borgert had been in a similar plight. As he stood on the station platform a few minutes before the train rolled in, he felt as if he had only just now risen from his chair at the festive board.
As he confided this impression to his principal, Kolberg, he did not forget to mention incidentally that, “of course,” he had forgotten to take his purse along. With a show of assumed indifference he stuffed the two “blue rags” into his watchpocket, Kolberg having fished the bills with trembling fingers out of his own wallet, and a silent pressure of the hand was the only thing Kolberg was ever to receive in lieu thereof.
They arrived at Kahle’s garrison in due time, still in a somewhat dazed condition. Kahle’s second had attended to all the preliminaries of the duel. It was a cold morning when two cabs rolled out of the town on their way to the garrison shooting stands, where the bloody meeting was to take place.
The sun was just peeping over the backs of the mountains to the east, and sent his first oblique rays down upon the hoar-frosted stubble fields.
Peacefully Nature spread her autumnal robe, and in the forest deep silence reigned. The only sound, now and then, was the fluttering of a dead leaf seeking its bed of repose on the bare earth.