This eloquence, native to the Indian, overbore the restraint of education, and as the wild torrent of feeling rushed over the multitude, it fired the superstition, brooding there, into a terrible conviction. A word only was wanting, like a lighted match, to ignite these lurid apprehensions. It came from a far-off corner of the meeting-house, where one of the witnesses stood aghast with wonder, and trembling in all his massive limbs.
"It is the man who came with us in the hold of the vessel. He followed her after the storm. He it was who left the heavy boxes in my keeping."
A shrewd bystander caught these words as they fell from the white lips of Jason Brown, and he cried out in a voice that rang through the court like a trumpet,
"Behold the confederate of her sorcery! The beautiful witch has brought Lucifer himself to plead her cause: mark the fire in his eyes, the breath from his nostrils; see the bronze on his forehead, the proud curve on his mouth!"
At these words there rose a tumult in the house. Women shrieked, and pressed forward to the doors; men broke into wild murmurs, or whispered together in low voices; while the judges stood up, pale as a group of statues; and the jury huddled together, looking into each other's faces aghast.
In the midst of this turmoil, Barbara Stafford felt a breath on her cheek, and looking suddenly up, met the glance of those eyes, which, a moment before, had frightened the people with their burning passion, now full of determined purpose.
He whispered something, but in the tumultuous noise Barbara lost its meaning. The next instant the rush of the crowd carried the noble youth from her sight, and when the court, recovering from its panic, looked around for this emissary of the dark one, who had denounced its proceedings face to face with the august judges, the strange advocate was gone.
Then, while the crowd was hushed with unconquerable awe, and the very heavens bent over it black with a mustering storm, the verdict of the jury ran in a low whisper from lip to lip, till it reached the savages brooding in the forest, and was mingled with the deep, deep curses of the white man—
"Guilty! guilty!"
Then the storm burst over them, shaking the window-panes, like angry fiends, uphurling great trees in the woods, and plowing up the virgin soil; and in the midst of its fury sentence was pronounced.