This noisy, mad procession moved in great disorder out into the highway, where Garde had paused, dismayed and concerned for Goody. She saw the wise old woman walking calmly along with her captors, for Goody, unlike the witches of lesser wisdom, knew too much to cry out wild protests against this infamy, and so to convict herself of uttering curses, spells and blasphemies on the public roads. She looked about her, at men and women she had relieved of pains, and at children whose early ailments she had exorcised with her simples.
They were all now possessed of the devil, in good faith, for the mad capers they cut to show that Goody was all potent to produce the most fiendish and heinous results upon them could only have been invented out of the sheer deviltry which is one of the component parts of the human animal.
Helpless, terrified by these maniacs about her, Garde could only lean against the fence and hold her place while the running, neck-twisting people went by.
“Oh, poor dear Goody,” she murmured to herself, involuntarily.
The old wise woman looked across the bank of bobbing heads about her and half smiled, in a weary, hopeless manner that sent a pang straight to Garde’s heart. She knew that Goody was saying, “Never mind me, dear,” and this only made it all the more unendurable.
Goody had been hustled by in a moment. The dust arose from the scurrying feet. The hobble-de-hoy pageant went rapidly toward the town, its numbers being momentarily augumented, as fresh persons heard the disturbance rising and coming near, on the summer air, and joined the throng.
Unwilling to let her friend be conveyed thus away without her even knowing where she was now to be taken, Garde followed the last of the stragglers, and so saw the crowd become a mob, in the more populous streets of the town, and finally beheld Goody hurried to one of the prisons and shut out of sight behind the doors.
The jail was the one into which, six years before, Adam Rust had been so infamously thrown.