He repeated them.
Again she was silent. Slowly her unresponsive gaze turned from the minister and swept the sea of upturned faces. Never was there a sterner, sadder crowd than the one upon which she looked down; the men lean, sour-visaged, the women already showing a delicacy, born of hardship and the pitiless New England winters. Children hoisted on the shoulders of yeomen were to be seen. She saw the wan, large-eyed face of little Ebenezer Gibbs, as his father held him up to behold the witch who had afflicted him with such grievous illness. Drawn together in a group were the gentry. And all thrilled to a general terror for none knew on whom the accusation might next fall. At the tavern, the loiterers, made reckless by the awful plague, gathered to be merry and pledge a cup to the dying.
With these latter mingled foreign sailors, their faces bronzed, wearing gold rings in their ears and gay scarves around their waists.
One of these tavern roisterers shouted: “Behold the imp the witch carries in the shape of a black cat!”
There came another cry: “Let the cat be strung up also, lest the witch’s spirit pass into it at her death!”
Others caught up and repeated the cry. An ominous murmur rose from the crowd, drowning the single voices.
The minister strove in vain to make himself heard.
To Deliverance the clamour was meaningless sound. But yet closer to her breast she clasped the little kitten.
Slowly she turned her head and her gaze travelled over the landscape. Vaguely she felt that she would never see the morrow’s sun, that now she looked her last upon the kind earth.