There had been trouble since Ulrich's departure. A French corps of
observation had been camped upon the hill, and twice within the month
had a French soldier been found murdered in the woods. Heavy had been
the penalties exacted from the village, and terrible had been the
Colonel's threats of vengeance. Now, for a third time, a soldier
stabbed in the back had been borne into camp by his raging comrades,
and this very afternoon the Colonel had sworn that if the murderer
were not handed over to him within an hour from dawn, when the camp
was to break up, he would before marching burn the village to the
ground. The Herr Pfarrer was on his way back from the camp where he
had been to plead for mercy, but it had been in vain.

"Such are foul deeds!" said Ulrich.

"The people are mad with hatred of the French," answered the Herr
Pastor. "It may be one, it may be a dozen who have taken vengeance
into their own hands. May God forgive them."

"They will not come forward--not to save the village?"

"Can you expect it of them! There is no hope for us; the village will
burn as a hundred others have burned."

Aye, that was true; Ulrich had seen their blackened ruins; the old
sitting with white faces among the wreckage of their homes, the little
children wailing round their knees, the tiny broods burned in their
nests. He had picked their corpses from beneath the charred trunks of
the dead elms.