Ulenspiegel trembled and cried out:
“Master judges, her hands are bleeding and her feet, too. The widow’s bones are broken, broken!”
The barber surgeon touched them with his finger, and Soetkin uttered a loud scream.
“Confess for her,” said the bailiff to Ulenspiegel.
But Soetkin looked at him with eyes like the eyes of the dead, wide open and staring. And he knew he could not speak, and he wept and said nothing.
But the bailiff said next:
“Since this woman is gifted with a man’s fortitude, we must try her courage before the torments of her son.”
Soetkin heard nothing, for she had lost her senses by reason of the great agony she had suffered.
They brought her back to consciousness with much vinegar. Then Ulenspiegel was stripped naked before the widow’s eyes. The executioner shaved his head and his whole body, so as to spy that he had no wicked spell on him. Then he perceived on his back the little black mark he carried from his birth. He thrust a long needle into it several times; but as the blood came, he decided that there was no sorcery in the mark. At the bailiff’s order, the hands of Ulenspiegel were tied with two cords running over a pulley fixed to the roof so that the executioner at the judges’ pleasure could hoist him up and let him drop with a brutal jerk; which he did nine times, having first hung a weight of twenty-five pounds on each foot.
At the ninth time, the skin of his wrists and ankles tore, and the bones of his legs began to come out of their sockets.