Again he clutched me by the arm and cried out, "Nay, go not, Brother Jabez; even if she touch thee not her look will blast thee like lightning."
"I fear her not," bragged I, and strode away, leaving him shuddering with the terror that had not yet grown cold, and with apprehensions for me.
I had no trouble in finding the thick bush and entangling vines Brother Martin had pointed out to me. As I approached its dark, forbidding front, I trembled like a leaf, and then grew angry at my weakness. Then I went on, resolutely forcing my way into the vile vines that caught me all about my face and body and limbs so that I was ready to affirm naught human could penetrate such a wilderness; but though I looked carefully for any signs that would show that some one or something had thrust itself into these exasperating vines I could find nothing, even though I had in all these years learned much of the ways of the woods and its signs.
In great bewilderment I was about to turn back to chide Brother Martin with having seen nothing but a creature of his own imagining when I saw in a small gully at the farther boundary of the thicket a footprint, small, a woman's surely, in the soft, clayey soil. Had the imprint been that of a cloven foot I could not have been more startled; for I knew that the Sisterhood seldom, if ever, came to the Brother woods, and the good wives and daughters of the near-by settlers were too timid and honest to trespass on our lands. Much perturbed, for I knew this thing boded evil to our community, I walked slowly back to my waiting brother, vague remembrances strangely flitting through my mind, but making no impression at the time, of how Sonnlein had come to me, and the midnight beating of our Brother Beissel.
I found Brother Martin, still pale and fearful, anxiously wanting to know what I had learned. "Nothing," I said, "of witch or devil, but the substantial print of a woman's foot."
"Was there no smell of brimstone? No cloven footprint?" he persisted.
"Nay, thou simple one, else I had told thee. Say thou naught of this; for they who would not believe thee would only laugh at thee, and if any believe what could that avail?"
"Nothing, dear Brother Jabez, nothing," he said mournfully, a strange, fixed look in his wild eyes. "A woman with an evil eye once looked upon my little brother as he lay laughing in the cradle my father had hewn out of a log. Until then the child was strong and healthy, never having been sick; but from that day he wasted away, with naught that could help or cure him, and within a month we laid him down in his little resting-place in the orchard nigh our cabin. They whom the evil eye look upon live not long." And then, as one who goes forth to certain death, he looked up at me smiling bravely through all his fears and said, "If my time hath come, let it come quickly, His servant waiteth."
I found it impossible to free him from this melancholy mood, and so we walked back slowly and sadly to our Kammers, saying nothing more.
A week passed, Brother Martin quietly, with resignation, doing his lowly duties each day; but we all could see he was in failing health. Only he and I knew, however, that the tortures of mind he was enduring far outweighed the lesser pains of the flesh; for I hesitate not to say of saint as well as sinner, that until death be actually at hand, they fear alike the inevitable end.