Today in Salem: It’s the Sabbath. It’s forbidden to work on Sundays, but it doesn’t stop the constable from chasing an accused 16-year-old girl who’s been hiding and escaping for four months now. Today he finds her at her grandmother’s house, dark and empty since the grandmother herself was arrested last spring.

The constable orders a local man and his dog to go with him to the house. Just as they enter, the runaway girl flings open the back door and bolts toward a neighbor’s field. The man and his dog chase her as fast as they can run, but they can’t catch her, even when she trips in her heavy petticoats.

The girl jumps up and runs behind a stone wall lined with bushes, with the man close behind. But when he finally reaches the wall, there’s no one there. He runs toward a nearby fence, but no one is there either except for a large cat. A witch! he thinks, and sics the dog on it, but the dog races in the opposite direction. In a panic, the man strikes at the cat with a stick, but the cat just squeezes under the fence and runs away. That’s it then. The man stands up to catch his breath. All of them are gone: the girl, the dog, and the cat. Even the constable is nowhere in sight, having stayed behind at the house. She must be a witch. That’s the only way to explain it.

Tomorrow in Salem: the fortuneteller Samuel Wardwell backpedals