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wax on the wound and she pulled aside the winding sheet and showed me the place.
                            
    Next, a woman named Mary Toothaker testified that the minister had ordered a convention of 305 witches to pull down the Kingdom of Christ and set up the Kingdom of Satan. Before long, confessed witch after confessed witch claimed that they had been baptized in the name of the Devil by the King of Hell himself, Reverend George Burroughs.
    Eighteen-year-old Susannah Sheldon, another refugee from the Indian war on the Maine frontier, said Burroughs threatened that if she wouldn’t sign the Devil’s book, he would tear her to pieces, starve her to death, and choke her until her vittles gave out. And to scare her even more, he said he killed three children on the frontier, smothered and choked two of his wives to death (their ghosts again agreed), and murdered two of his own children.
                            
    Though Burroughs was a short, slender man, some witnesses testified that he possessed superhuman strength that could only come from the Devil. Why, he could put two fingers in the bung holes of enormous barrels of molasses or cider or meat and lift them out of a canoe all by himself! He could put one finger into the seven-foot-long muzzle of a heavy fowling gun and hold the weapon straight out in front of him at arm’s length. He could run faster than any horse. He could turn into a gray cat. And a man named Thomas Ruck swore that Burroughs “could tell his thoughts.”
    But who made the most stunning accusations in the entire case? It was none other than Ann Putnam Jr.’s servant, Mercy Lewis. Unlike most of the young accusers, Lewis knew Burroughs—not from the time he lived in Salem Village, but from the time he spent as the minister of Falmouth, Maine, her hometown.
    When Lewis was three years old, Falmouth had been attacked and burned to cinders by Indians, and she and the few members of her family who were still alive had escaped to an island in Casco Bay with Reverend Burroughs’s help. Much later, when she was 16 years old, Lewis’s parents were killed (possibly right before her eyes) in another battle with the Indians, and she apparently became a servant in Burroughs’s household for a short while after that.
    Burroughs had escaped from every single Indian attack on the frontier without a scratch. Did Lewis believe he was an ally of the Indians? She thought the Indians were devils, and she certainly wanted to get him in trouble, because this is what she swore under oath on April 3:
    On the evening of May 7, before his first hearing had even begun, she had seen the spirit of Burroughs, whom she knew very well. This apparition tortured her horribly over and over again, urging her to sign her name in a mysterious book that he kept in his study. He said he had several books she had never seen, and he could use this one to raise the Devil himself. He told Lewis that the Devil was his servant and said he had even commanded the Devil to bewitch several other teenage girls.
    Again he tortured Lewis, threatening to kill her if she told anybody what he had just said and ordering her once more to sign her name in the Devil’s book. Though he was shaking her all to pieces, she cried that she would never write in that book even if he killed her.
    Then she told a rapt audience what happened two days later:
    Mr. Burroughs carried me up to an exceedingly high mountain and showed me all the Kingdoms of the earth and told me he would give them all to me if I would write in his book, and if I would not he would throw me down and break my neck: but I told him they were not his to give and I would not write if he throwed me down on 100 pitchforks.
    Upon hearing this testimony, the hideous clamor and screeching of the afflicted girls became so intense that they were removed from the courtroom for their own safety.



CHAPTER SEVEN
OYER & TERMINR
    O n May 14, Royal Governor