Thus they kept spread like a dense net their judiciary powers over the dominion subject to their fierce rule, always eager for a chance to apply it. And indeed nowhere were there such singular crimes to punish as in this same Ruechenstein. Their inventive gift was fairly inexhaustible. It seemed almost as though their talent for discovering ever new and hitherto unheard-of crimes acted as a spur on sinners to commit the latest delinquencies threatened with penalties of the severest type. However, if despite all this at any time there was a lack of evildoers, the people of the town knew how to help themselves. For then they simply caught and punished the rascals of other towns. And it was only a man with a clear conscience who had the hardihood to cross at any time the territory of Ruechenstein. For when they heard of a crime committed, even if done far away from their own area, they would seize and hold the first landloper that came along, put him to the torture and make him confess his guilt. Not infrequently it would happen that such enforced confession related to a crime that, as later turned out, had only been based on hearsay, and had really never been done. But then it was too late. The supposed malefactor had been hung in chains on the gallows or otherwise disposed of, and could not be brought to life again. Of course, it was unavoidable that because of this inclination of the people of Ruechenstein they would often get into a more or less acrimonious controversy with other towns whose citizens they had thus overzealously dispatched, and they even had constantly pending a number of such cases before the Swiss federal council, and had to be sharply reprimanded, but that did not cure them. By preference the people of Ruechenstein liked calm, sunny, pleasant weather when indulging in their favorite amusement of holding penal executions, burnings at the stake, and forcible drownings, and that is why on fine summer days there was always something of the kind going on there. The wanderer in a far-off field might then, keeping his eyes fastened on the greyish rock buttress high up on the horizon, notice not infrequently the flashing of the headsman's sword, the smoke pillar of the stake, or in the bed of the river something like the glittering leaping of a fish, which would usually mean the bobbing up and down of a witch undergoing the solemn test. And the word of God on a Sunday they would not have relished at all without at least one erring lovers' couple with straw wreaths before the altar and without the reading out of some sharpened moral mandates. Other festivals, processions and public pleasures there were none; all such were prohibited by numerous mandates or ordinances.