"The stroke took him before their very eyes," Radtke went on. "His precious sweetheart, the village carpenter's daughter, the baggage who lived with him, you know, threw herself on his body, for the Lord only knows what liberties they might not have taken with it when their blood was up."
"And now they refuse to bury him, you say?" interrupted the good-natured Karl Engelbert, shaking his head meditatively. "Is such a scandalous outrage as that allowed to pass unpunished in a Christian country?"
Johann laughed scoffingly.
"The Schrandeners are like a flock of sheep. If one declines to pollute his hands with bearing such carrion to the grave, all the rest decline also. And who can blame them?"
"But," some one suggested, "suppose it came to the ear of the law?"
"The law! Ha, ha! Old Merckel is their magistrate, and he says, as far as he is concerned, they might have flayed----"
He broke off abruptly, for with a smothered cry of pain, and a gesture half threatening, half self-defensive, the young lieutenant had started to his feet. He was whiter than the whitewashed wall behind him, and a thin thread of crimson trickled from his blanched lips, over his chin.
"Stop, for God's sake!" he stammered in a strange muffled almost inaudible voice, and those who caught his words shrank away in horror.
"He was my father!"