So saying he sprang into the carnage. The Neuenfähr man had meant to ask five thalers, now he would not do it under ten, and so he should get twenty. For that one might leave even a murder behind one! "Make way there! Make way!" cried the Neuenfähr man with an oath, cracking his whip loudly over the heads of the dark figures who were running towards him down the village street, and more than one of whom he nearly ran over. For twenty thalers it was worth while running over somebody--in the dark too! In the darkness and the storm! It really was worse than before, though then it had been bad enough, and he had said a dozen times, "We had better stop at Faschwitz, sir;" and then as they came to Grausewitz, "We had better stop at Grausewitz, sir;" but the young gentleman--Herr von Werben--had always called out, "Drive on, drive on! Farther, farther!" If he had only known that half an hour later the lady would have been dead as a door-nail! and he had taken the horse-cloths too to cover her feet, here in this very place! The fact seemed so important to the Neuenfähr man that he stopped to show the gentleman the very spot, and to breathe his horses a little too, for they could hardly make way at all against the storm. To the right of the road was a steep clay bank some five or six feet high, at whose edge stood two or three willows wildly tossed about by the wind; to the left was level marshy ground reaching down to the sea, which must be about a mile or so off, although they could hear it roaring as if it were close by the roadside. "On, on!" cried the gentleman. "Are you in such a hurry, too?" said the Neuenfähr man, and grumbled something about commercial travellers, who were not officers so far as he knew, and need not snap up an old soldier of the reserve in that way; but he whipped his horses up again, when suddenly the gentleman, who had been standing up behind him in the carriage, clutched his shoulder with his right hand, and pointing with the other to the left, cried: "There, that way!" "Where to?" said the driver. "No matter where! That way!" "We can pass it," said the Neuenfähr man, thinking only that the gentleman was afraid that in the narrow road they could not get out of the way of a carriage which had just appeared coming towards them through the grey mist, and might still be a few hundred yards from them. The gentleman caught him by both shoulders. "Confound it!" cried the Neuenfähr man. "Are you mad?" "I will give you a hundred thalers!" "I'll not be drowned for a hundred thalers!" "Two hundred!" "All right!" cried the driver, and whipped up his horses as he turned them to the left from the sandy road down to the marshes. The water oozed up under their feet, but then came firmer ground again. It might not be so bad after all; and two hundred thalers! He called to his horses, and whipped them up again.