Peller and the robbers are rescued from the sheriff’s dungeon

Peller and the robbers are rescued from the sheriff’s dungeon in an episode that makes Matt’s protection of his followers tangible while drawing the sheriff’s attention more forcefully onto his band. The rescue exposes the competing rules governing the forest: the sheriff’s authority, the robbers’ obligations to one another, and Ronia’s conviction that the better answer is to stop robbing altogether.

Background and the Rescue

By the time the rescue is discussed at Matt’s Fort, the robbers’ life has resumed its usual noise: they sing and dance, and Matt laughs as before. Yet the apparent return to normality conceals a change. The struggle with the sheriff’s men has grown tougher, and Matt understands that they are now pursuing him in particular.

Matt explains that the soldiers’ attention is connected to one dark-night operation: his band took Peller out of the sheriff’s dungeon and freed two of Borka’s robbers at the same time. Little-Snip had believed Peller was going to be hanged, giving the rescue an immediate life-or-death urgency. The account confirms that Matt’s action reached beyond his own followers to men from the opposing band.

Matt’s Code of Protection

Matt presents the rescue as an expression of his responsibility for his people. He insists that no one hangs his robbers and says he has taught Peller that robbers do not remain where others put them. His words turn an escape from custody into a declaration of loyalty: the sheriff may imprison a robber, but Matt claims the right and duty to bring him back.

That code sits uneasily beside the cause of the sheriff’s pursuit. Matt describes the rescue as protection, but it is still an intervention against the sheriff’s authority, and the soldiers’ response makes its cost plain. Noddle-Pete says the rescue is why soldiers now swarm through the woods like cattle flies. In the larger conflict between official law and the robbers’ own obligations, an act Matt regards as just and necessary becomes a reason for the sheriff to intensify the hunt.

Consequences for the Rival Bands

The rescue also reveals a practical connection between the two robber groups. Matt frees two of Borka’s men alongside Peller, even though the bands remain divided and continue to contend with one another. Their shared exposure to the sheriff does not by itself end their rivalry, but it makes the weakness of that division harder to ignore.

Noddle-Pete repeatedly urges Matt and Borka to reconcile before it is too late. A single strong band, he argues, might be able to deal with the sheriff and his men; two bands that waste their strength cheating each other and fighting over plunder cannot. The rescue therefore serves as a pressure point in the wider conflict: Matt has already acted across the boundary between the bands to save their men, while the sheriff’s mounting pursuit raises the stakes of remaining separate.

Ronia’s Alternative

Ronia does not accept the rescue, or the robbers’ loyalty to one another, as a solution to the underlying violence. When the possibility of uniting the bands is being discussed, she says the most cunning idea would be to stop robbing, a position she says she has always held. Her judgment redirects the argument away from how the robbers might outwit the sheriff and toward whether their occupation should continue at all.

The episode thus places several kinds of obligation alongside one another. Matt treats loyalty to imprisoned followers as a duty; the sheriff’s men enforce the authority of the state; and Ronia challenges the moral premises shared by both robber bands. The escape succeeds for Peller and the two Borka men, but its lasting consequence is not peace: it helps bring the soldiers deeper into the woods and makes the question of unity—and of abandoning robbery—more urgent.