“Did I aught to you?” I asked from where I sat. “Did I more than bid you a good day and ask after your dame?”
“Aye, that was all you did,” answered Bly, “but I recalled afterward that you did cast a longing look at my pig.”
“’Twas because I had not yet eaten that day,” I said, smiling a bit at the remembrance, “and your porker[porker] was a fine fat one. I wished for a bit of bacon from it.”
“Yea, he looked at the pig,” proceeded the witness, “and when I got the animal a little farther on it took strange fits. It leaped into the air, squealing most dreadful, and knocked its head against the fence. So I was sure it was bewitched, for never did pig of mine behave so before.”
“What say you to that?” asked Judge Corwin.
“Naught,” I made reply, “save that the animal had some distemper.”
Then Benjamin Proctor took the stand. He eagerly related that when I had first come to Salem there had been the terrifying scarlet snow, which, though two women witches had doubtless caused it, might have had some of my handiwork in also, as I was the only stranger to arrive in town that night.
Next he related how I had such great strength that I could do feats no other man could attempt. I had taken a gun, Proctor said, with a seven-foot barrel, of so great weight that strong men could not with both hands hold it out steadily. Yet he had seen me make nothing of taking the weapon up and, by grasping it near the lock, hold it out as easily as a man would a pistol, discharging it at a mark.
Again, he said, he had seen me take a heavy fowling piece with a five-foot barrel, and lift it in the following marvelous manner. I thrust my forefinger down the muzzle and held the piece out at arm’s length. Other strong men had only been able to hold this gun out in the usual way, Proctor said, yet I supported the entire weight on one finger.
Master Proctor told how I had lifted a barrel of molasses high above my head, something no other man of those parts could do. Lastly he related, with much detail, how he and others had seen me cast the stone by the brook that May day. I had plucked the rock from its bed as though it was but a gun flint, he said, and had heaved it from me so that it rolled down the hill, striking another bowlder. The stone I cast had broken into a thousand pieces, some narrowly missing a maid of the Colony, one Lucille de Guilfort. I had been near to causing her death, Proctor said, which must have come speedily, amid the flying rock fragments, had I not been a witch, and made the stones to fall harmless all about the maid.