"Clara, I'm the sort of man that people can twist round their finger—they call me a milksop; but it may be I'm going to pick a quarrel for once. Don't you take on about it. I thought it'd never have to come to this, but now I see quite plain that it must."
Then he went out and made the garden fence higher still, and plaited thorns in and out, and chained the house-dog at the corner of the garden.
But the stag still came and ate the cabbages.
Then Heidepeter got up, and took the road under his feet, and climbed over the steep slope until he came to Castle Frohnburg on the other side of the mountain. There a great shooting party were assembled, noblemen and gentlemen, and all drinking out of foaming beakers "Good luck to the sportsman!"
Peter strode through the midst of them and right up to his master. He seemed like another man than himself to-day. "I must defend my bread, sir," he said in a stifled voice; "but so that I mayn't do any wrong, I've come all this way to tell you I'm going to shoot the stag."
Then the Count roared with laughter and called out:
"You little fool! why do you put yourself to the trouble?" He whistled for his two bulldogs. Heidepeter said never another word, but went away. And that night he shot the stag.
Early next morning the huntsmen came to his house and clapped irons on his hands. He suffered this quietly, and said to his inconsolable wife:
"Don't you take on about it—don't you take on. The Lord will come and do justice yet!" And so Peter was taken away and thrown into prison as a poacher.
Week after week he sat there. He was thinking neither about his cabbages, nor the stag, nor the Count, but only about his wife. "Perhaps her hour will come to-morrow, perhaps even to-day, and thy wife is giving thee thy first-born. She is holding him out to thee, but thou dost not hold out thy arms to take him! Or there may be some difficulty about the sponsors, and thou art not by her side to help her in her great need; and when thou returnest to thy house thou wilt find a mother without her child, or an orphan—or perhaps neither mother nor child"——