Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/52

lives of Mrs. Good and Mrs. Osburn, had heard Martha Corey declare she ought to have been soundly spanked—that she was a tale-inventing jade. Now Ann Putnam had told her father it was Martha Corey who entered her bed chamber, astride a witch's broomstick.

On the morning of March 12, 1692, Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever rode into the barnyard of the Corey farmhouse and clamored on the kitchen door with their sword hilts.

"I know why you come," Martha Corey said as she swung the door open and recognized her visitors. "You have come to say I am a witch; but I am none. I am a Gospel woman."

Putnam and Cheever looked knowingly at each other. How came this woman to know their errand before they had opened their lips?

"You have been cried out against," Cheever told her solemnly. "The children of Salem Village say you have appeared unto them—"

"And did they saw how I was dressed?" the old lady interrupted. "Did they tell you what clothes I wore?"

Here was a poser. No one had thought to ask Ann Putnam what clothes the witch wore when she appeared, but certainly she must have worn some. Puritans, even when they sold their souls to the devil and became witches, never appeared in public or private save fully dressed.

Straight back to Salem Village rode Ezekiel Cheever and Edward Putnam to question Ann regarding the witch's dress.

When they arrived they found the Evil One's work had preceded them. Ann Putnam had talked with her friends and playmates—now all were undergoing terrible agonies, crying out they were being cruelly pinched and bitten by some invisible person. Between times they were crawling beneath chairs and tables, sticking out their tongues at fathers and mothers and acting generally as no well-behaved Puritan children ever acted when not under the spell of some powerful witch or wizard.

"What clothes wore the witch when she appeared last night?" Putnam asked the daughter.

"She—she—" the girl strove to recall, then fell to sobbing bitterly. "I cannot tell," she wailed. "She was all wrapped round with a blaze of hell-fire; I could not see her clothes."

No one asked Ann Putnam how she knew the blaze to be that of hell-fire, or how such fire differed from that commonly seen on the chimney hearth. The wicked witch's scheme was exposed. She had asked if the child could describe her clothes when she well knew her enveloping sheet of hell-fire prevented her clothing from being seen.

A warrant was forthwith issued for the arrest of Martha Corey, housewife, of Salem Farms.

The Pitmans had not perfected their shorthand system in 1692, and all court reporting which has come down to us from that time consists of abbreviated longhand notes; but the Reverend Samuel Parris, pastor of Salem Village Church, apparently added the duties of court reporter to those of assistant magistrate and prosecutor, since we have the following transcript of Martha Corey's examination preserved in his handwriting:

By Magistrate John Hathorn: Question. You are now in the hands of authority. Tell me, now, why do you hurt these children?

Answer. I do not.

Q. Who doth?

A. Pray give me leave to go and pray. (This request was repeated several times.)