When A Witch is Young

The first, the last—the only King the Americans ever had, was dead. It was the 13th day of August, in the year 1676. The human emotions of the Puritan people of Massachusetts tugged at the shackles of a long repression and broke them asunder, in the seemly town of Plymouth. King Philip, the mighty Sachem of the Wampanoag Indians, had been slain. His warriors were scattered and slaughtered. His war was ended.

Through the streets of Plymouth poured a vast throng of people. Men, women and children, they ran and walked, surrounding a buff-colored army that filled the thoroughfares like a turgid flood. This was the regiment which Captain Benjamin Church had led to the final camp of King Philip, in the swamps at Mt. Hope and Pocasset, where the last scene in the sanguinary drama had been enacted.

Here was a troop of sixty horse, with officers. They were well mounted, caparisoned with glittering back, breast and headpiece, and armed with clanking sword, shouldered carbine, and great pistols, that flopped at the waist. Behind them were foot-soldiers, brown Puritans—stern, mirth-denying, lusty at fighting. Some of these bore no weapon other than a pike. Another frequently had upon him sword, pistol and carbine. Above the heads of these men on foot waved a thin forest of pike-staves, on the tips of which bright steel threw back the dazzling rays of the sun. There was clatter of scabbards on the pavement, thud and thud of hoofs and feet in the roadway, and above all, shouts of men and gabble of children.

There were hordes on either side of this human flood, pushing and crowding to gain the front of the column, while a similar aggregation hung back upon the flank of the regiment, hooting, craning necks and racing to keep pace with the steady, long strides of the soldiers. This division of interest was caused by the two counter attractions of the pageant. Thus at the front, a red Indian was leading the march with a wild, half-dancing step, while he contorted his body weirdly for the purpose of displaying to all beholders the ghastly proof of victory—the head of the great King Philip. This Indian ally might have stood for the mockery of a drum-major, heading a march of doom.

The spectators, racing, crowding, following, took a crazed delight in beholding this gory head. Love, anger, joy, the daily emotions of man, were habitually so repressed by these serious people that now it seemed as if they reveled as in an orgie of shuddering and gasping, to give vent to their pent-up natures. They laughed, they skipped on nimble feet, they sang praises. The young men and women snatched the occasion, with its looseness of deportment, to look unbridled feelings into one another’s eyes.

The other attraction, in the rear, was a captive, a mere boy, as white as any in the multitude, and paler than the palest. Tall and lithe as he was, his age was scarcely a whit above fourteen. He was dressed as an Indian; he bore himself like a sullen brave. At his side was old Annawon, the last of King Philip’s councilors, who, having surrendered under a promise of “good quarter” was even now being led to his execution.