They immediately tied the girl's hands behind her, and fastening the baby to her neck, put her in the lock-up, and there the inquiry began early the next morning.
The girl denied nothing. She had killed her child and would have buried it to conceal her shame. She made no excuses, she did not even weep or beg for mercy. The one thing they could not get out of her was: who was the child's father? On this point she remained doggedly silent, and was ready to suffer threefold torture rather than speak.
The Sheriff, Michael Dóronczius, was the presiding judge who pronounced sentence upon the criminal. For her great sin against God, he said, she was to endure the punishment prescribed for such offences in the statute-book of the town, without any mitigation.
Within living memory no such crime had been committed in our town, so that not even the people themselves knew what form the execution would take, therefore an enormous multitude assembled on the appointed day at the place of execution to see what manner of death she who had murdered her child was to die.
I also was there, and I shall never forget the spectacle, but I would not go to such a sight again if they were to promise me the best part of the town of Caschau for it.
Beneath the scaffold a long trench had been dug about four feet in depth, and beside it stood the executioner's two apprentices.
In this trench Catharine was laid backwards, so that her head alone emerged above it; it was just as if she were lying comfortably in bed.
Then they bound her hands and feet tightly to stout pegs at the bottom of the trench, and the executioner placed the point of a large stake just above Catharine's heart, and held it there while the executioner's assistants filled the whole trench with earth, so that at last only the girl's head was visible above it.
And when nothing more was to be seen but her head, with its pale face, the chaplain approached her, and, kneeling down beside her, urged her for the sake of the salvation of her soul and for the remission of her sins to confess herself truly to him and tell him everything which might relieve her heart of its heavy burden—for had she not two feet in the grave already.
The head visible above the earth looked sorrowfully around it in every direction twice or thrice, as if it were waiting for some one, as if it believed that at that consummate moment some one would appear to save it, and when, after all, it saw no deliverer approaching, two heavy tears dropped from its eyes and, trickling down its pale face, fell upon the earth which now reached to its very chin. Then she, who was thus buried before she was dead, whispered that she would confess everything, and not in secret, but so that the whole world should hear it.