Kohlhaas' track and thought that he would soon be able to bring the incendiary himself in chains. By force of all these reassuring circumstances he succeeded in allaying the fears of the assembled crowd and in partially reconciling them to the presence of the Squire until the return of the courier from Dresden. He dismounted from his horse and, accompanied by some knights, entered the house after the posts and stockades had been cleared away. He found the Squire, who was falling from one faint into another, in the hands of two doctors, who with essences and stimulants were trying to restore him to consciousness. As Sir Otto von Gorgas realized that this was not the moment to exchange any words with him on the subject of the behavior of which he had been guilty, he merely told him, with a look of quiet contempt, to dress himself, and, for his own safety, to follow him to the apartments of the knight's prison. They put a doublet and a helmet on the Squire and when, with chest half bare on account of the difficulty he had in breathing, he appeared in the street on the arm of the Governor and his brother-in-law, the Count of Gerschau, blasphemous and horrible curses against him rose to heaven. The mob, whom the lansquenets found it very difficult to restrain, called him a bloodsucker, a miserable public pest and a tormentor of men, the curse of the city of Wittenberg, and the ruin of Saxony. After a wretched march through the devastated city, in the course of which the Squire's helmet fell off several times without his missing it and had to be replaced on his head by the knight who was behind him, they reached the prison at last, where he disappeared into a tower under the protection of a strong guard. Meanwhile the return of the courier with the decree of the Elector had aroused fresh alarm in the city. For the Saxon government, to which the citizens of Dresden had made direct application in an urgent petition, refused to permit the Squire to sojourn in the electoral capital before the incendiary had been captured. The Governor was instructed rather to use all the power at his command to protect the Squire just where he was, since he had to stay somewhere, but in order to pacify the good city of Wittenberg, the inhabitants were informed that a force of five hundred men under the command of Prince Friedrich of Meissen was already on the way to protect them from further molestation on the part of Kohlhaas.