Samuel Parris bore his daughter home and laid her on her own white bed, where she writhed like a wounded fawn in the snow. Her face was rosy with flushes, that came and went like gleams of light on marble; her lips were in constant motion; she muttered continually about Barbara Stafford and Norman Lovel. Sometimes she called aloud for her mother, and declared with child-like earnestness that she saw her gliding through the room with her golden hair smoothed under a close cap, and a white dress sweeping around her like the wings of an angel.

The old minister listened to all this in stern sorrow. His ewe lamb was smitten down before his eyes: God had suffered his idolatrous love to find a terrible punishment. What could he do? how act to save that beautiful one from perdition?

Norman Lovel was sad. Barbara Stafford had disappeared like a myth. His approach seemed to have driven her away, and he found Elizabeth, from whom he had parted in anger, writhing on a bed of pain, muttering her wild fancies and crying aloud for help.

Abigail Williams moved about coldly and in breathless silence. The curse of witchcraft was upon the house, hatred and death clung around it like cerecloths to a coffin. What if she, too, were possessed—the story of old Tituba, a device of the Evil One, and the young chief so wildly beautiful, who claimed relationship with her, the arch fiend himself? The very foundations of her reason seemed shaken by these doubts, and as the moans and cries of Elizabeth reached her ear from time to time, she would pause in her work and stand motionless like a block of marble, till some new sound startled her into life again.

All night Samuel Parris sat by the bedside of his child, pallid and thoughtful. Over and again he questioned her in the midst of her wild speeches, as a judge sifts the words of a doubtful witness. Sometimes he fell into audible prayer, and again sat in dull silence pondering gloomily.

When the morning came he went forth, and, mounting his horse, rode to the nearest magistrate, who was a deacon in his own church, and a man of iron domination. Samuel Parris knew well that after his appeal to this man, there could be little free will left to him.

No wonder then that he walked heavily, and paused long upon the door-step before entering. He shrunk from hunting down the life of a helpless woman, and shuddered at the thought of making a charge from which there was no chance of retreat.

The minister went in at last, and the door closed heavily after him. The sound of a muffled drum could not have followed his footsteps more solemnly.

After an hour the old man came forth again, and moved with a slow tread down the village street toward his own dwelling. As he passed the doors of his parishioners, men and women came out and questioned him in low tones, and with looks of awe, regarding the condition of his child. He answered them all patiently, but with a sad weariness of manner that turned curiosity into compassion.

On the threshold of his home Samuel Parris met three men, members of his own congregation, who greeted him in silence, as neighbors salute the chief mourners at a funeral. Then the four passed in, and mounted to the chamber where Elizabeth lay, with her wild eyes lifted to the ceiling, and her hands waving about in the air.

These four good men—for after the manner of the times they were good—sat down in silence, and each gathered from the lips of the delirious girl the evidence which was to imperil a human life. When they had listened an hour keenly and conscientiously, each according to his light, they arose and went forth, shaking Samuel Parris by the hand with touching solemnity.

The old minister saw his friends file away from the house, and bend their course toward that of the magistrate, and then he felt with a pang of unutterable sorrow that the fate of Barbara Stafford had passed out of his hands.

That day a posse of men, headed by a constable, armed with a warrant to arrest Barbara Stafford for witchcraft, passed through the village and into the forest, taking the track which the unhappy woman had pursued. The moss and forest sward was moist yet, and with the keen eyes of men accustomed to pursue an Indian trail they found traces of her progress—now a faint footprint—then a broken twig or a fragment of her garments. Thus step by step they pursued her, till at last the whole group stood upon a swell of land that overlooked the hollow in which the Indians had built that sylvan lodge. At the entrance a red shawl had been stretched, which was now folded back to let the daylight through, and in the warm shadow beyond they saw the object of their search sitting in dreary thought.

A single Indian lay upon the turf a little way off, guarding the lodge with a vigilance the more watchful because his companions had gone forth in search of food.

The posse of men held a whispered consultation. They understood the condition of things, and resolved to act promptly before help came.

In the savage warfare which had ended in the subjugation of the kingly tribes, Indian life was held scarcely more sacred than that of the wild deer and panthers that infested the hills. When the constable saw that athletic savage lying upon the turf, with his broad chest exposed like that of a bronze statue, he drew the gun which he carried to his shoulder with a grim smile, called on God to bless the murder, and touched the ponderous lock with his finger. A sharp click, a loud report, a fierce cry: the savage leaped into the air, fell upon his face, all his limbs quivering, and with a single spasm lay dead across the entrance of Barbara Stafford's hiding-place.

Barbara came forth white and trembling, saw the dead savage at her feet, and looked fearfully around for his murderers. A group of men and a wreath of pale smoke curling out upon the air revealed all her danger. She did not retreat, but fell upon her knees and lifted the head of the Indian up from the ground. Drops of crimson stole down the bronze chest and fell slowly to the turf.

Barbara did not attempt to escape, though she saw at a glance all her danger. The savage who had been her protector was shot through the heart. The sight of so much life and strength smitten down in one instant paralyzed her. She had never witnessed a violent death before, and the shock bereft her alike of hope and fear.

The constable understood, and whispering his men to follow, crept toward her. She saw him without caring to escape, but, stooping over the body of her friend, shook her head mournfully as he came up.

"Unhappy man, you have killed him," she said, lifting her eyes to his face with a glance of pathetic reproach.

The constable stooped down, dragged the body from her feet, and cast it headlong down the slope of earth on which she stood. Then, without a word, he seized Barbara by both her wrists, and grasped them together with a firm grip of one hand, while he searched in his pocket for a thong of deer-skin prepared for the occasion. Putting one end of the thong between his teeth, he wound the other tightly over her wrists—so tightly that the delicate hands grew purple to the finger ends. Then he finished his barbarous work with a double knot tightened with both hands and teeth.

The outraged woman lifted her eyes to his face with a frightened look as he performed this brutal act, but she neither protested nor struggled; once she observed gently that he hurt her hands, but, when no heed was taken, allowed him to proceed without further remonstrance.

When her hands were bound, the constable tore down her shawl from the entrance of the lodge and placed it on her shoulders, crossing it over her bosom and knotting it behind, thus forming a double thraldom for her arms.

She bore it all patiently and in silence; once she cast an earnest look into the depths of the forest, perhaps with a hope that her savage friends might come to the rescue, but she only met the gleaming eyes of a wild-cat, swinging lazily on a bough to which human approach had driven him. Even there her glance was answered by a low growl and a gleam of savage teeth. The wild beasts were defying her in one direction, and human cruelty dragging her to death in another.

Thus, helpless and unresisting, she was forced into the settlement again, bound like a criminal. She made neither protest nor resistance, but remained quietly in the hands of her captors, accepting her fate with touching resignation.