Adam found the latter still awake and at work.  He was prepared for the danger that threatened him, and ready to fly.  No word of complaint, not even a hasty gesture betrayed the mental anguish of the persecuted man, and the smith’s heart melted, as he heard the doctor rouse his wife and child from their sleep.

The terrified moans of the startled wife, and Ruth’s loud weeping and curious questions, were soon drowned by the lamentations of old Rahel, who wrapped in even more kerchiefs than usual, rushed into the sitting-room, and while lamenting and scolding in a foreign tongue, gathered together everything that lay at hand.  She had dragged a large chest after her, and now threw in candlesticks, jugs, and even the chessmen and Ruth’s old doll with a broken head.

When the third hour after midnight came, the doctor was ready for departure.

Marx’s charcoal sledge, with its little horse, stopped before the door.

This was a strange animal, no larger than a calf, as thin as a goat, and in some places woolly, in others as bare as a scraped poodle.

The smith helped the dumb woman into the sleigh, the doctor put Ruth in her lap, Ulrich consoled the child, who asked him all sorts of questions, but the old woman would not part from the chest, and could scarcely be induced to enter the vehicle.

“You know, across the mountains into the Rhine valley—­no matter where,” Costa whispered to the poacher.

Hangemarx urged on his little horse, and answered, not turning to the Israelite, who had addressed him, but to Adam, who he thought would understand him better than the bookworm:  “It won’t do to go up the ravine, without making any circuit.  The count’s hounds will track us, if they follow.  We’ll go first up the high road by the Lautenhof.  To-morrow will be a fair-day.  People will come early from the villages and tread down the snow, so the dogs will lose the scent.  If it would only snow.”

Before the smithy, the doctor held out his hand to Adam, saying:  “We part here, friend.”

“We’ll go with you, if agreeable to you.”

“Consider,” the other began warningly, but Adam interrupted him, saying: 

“I have considered everything; lost is lost.  Ulrich, take the doctor’s sack from his shoulder.”

For a long time nothing more was said.

The night was clear and cold; the men’s footsteps fell noiselessly on the soft snow, nothing was heard except the creaking of the sledge, and ever and anon Elizabeth’s low moaning, or a louder word in the old woman’s soliloquy.  Ruth had fallen asleep on her mother’s lap, and was breathing heavily.

At Lautenhof a narrow path led through the mountains deep into the forest.

As it grew steeper, the snow became knee-deep, and the men helped the little horse, which often coughed, tossing its thick head up and down, as if working a churn.  Once, when the poor creature met with a very heavy fall, Marx pointed to the green woollen scarf on the animal’s neck, and whispered to the smith “Twenty years old, and has the glanders besides.”