though upon the occasion of this attack he allowed the Baron to slip
through his fingers. When the ruins of the Schloss cooled, he caused
them to be removed and flung stone by stone into the river, leaving not
a vestige of the castle that had so long been a terror to the district,
holding that if the lair were destroyed the wolf would not return. In
this the Count proved but partly right. Baron von Wiethoff renounced
his order, and became an outlaw, gathering round him in the forest all
the turbulent characters, not in regular service elsewhere, publishing
along the Rhine by means of prisoners he took and then released that as
the nobility seemed to object to his preying upon the merchants, he
would endeavour to amend his ways and would harry instead such castles
as fell into his hands. Thus Baron von Wiethoff became known as the
Outlaw of the Hundsrueck, and being as intrepid as he was merciless,
soon made the Rhenish nobility withdraw attention from other people's
quarrels in order to bestow strict surveillance upon their own. It is
possible that if the dwellers along the river had realised at first the
kind of neighbour that had been produced by burning out the Baron, they
might, by combination have hunted him down in the widespread forests of
the Hundsrueck, but as the years went on, the Outlaw acquired such
knowledge of the interminable mazes of this wilderness, that it is
doubtful whether all the troops in the Empire could have brought his
band to bay. The outlaws always fled before a superior force, and
always massacred an inferior one, and like the lightning, no man could
predict where the next stroke would fall. On one occasion he even
threatened the walled town of Coblentz, and the citizens compounded
with him, saying they had no quarrel with any but the surrounding
nobles, which expression the thrifty burghers regretted when Count
Herbert marched his men through their streets and for every coin they,
had paid the Outlaw, exacted ten.