So far as I could make out this Mueller was said to have had the contract for the construction of a stretch of mountain railroad here.
HOFFMANN
Yes, with a wretched capital of ten thousand crowns. When he came to see that the money wouldn't go far enough, he was in haste to make a catch of one of the Witzdorf farmers' daughters; the honour was to have fallen to my wife.
LOTH
They said that he had his arrangement with the daughter, and you had made yours with the father.—Next he shot himself, didn't he?—And you finished the construction of his section of the road and made a great deal of money out of it?
HOFFMANN
There's an element of truth in all that. Of course, I could give you a very different notion of how those things hung together. Perhaps they knew a few more of these edifying anecdotes.
LOTH
There was one thing, I am bound to tell you, that seemed to excite them particularly: they computed what an enormous business you were doing in coal now, and they called you—well, it wasn't exactly flattering. In short they asserted that you had persuaded the stupid farmers of the neighbourhood, over some champagne, to sign a contract by which the exploitation of all the coal mined on their property was turned over to you at a ridiculously small rental.