Truth to tell, it was a bitter wind, and seemed to blow to the very
heart of a man whose blood, heated but now with rapid riding, was
the more sensitive to the chilling blast. Will was a daring
fellow, and cared not a jot for hard knocks or sharp blades; but he
could not persuade himself to move or walk about, having just that
vague expectation of a sudden assault which made it a comfortable
thing to have something at his back, even though that something
were a gallows-tree. He had no great faith in the superstitions of
the age, still such of them as occurred to him did not serve to
lighten the time, or to render his situation the more endurable.
He remembered how witches were said to repair at that ghostly hour
to churchyards and gibbets, and such-like dismal spots, to pluck
the bleeding mandrake or scrape the flesh from dead men's bones, as
choice ingredients for their spells; how, stealing by night to
lonely places, they dug graves with their finger-nails, or anointed
themselves before riding in the air, with a delicate pomatum made
of the fat of infants newly boiled. These, and many other fabled
practices of a no less agreeable nature, and all having some
reference to the circumstances in which he was placed, passed and
repassed in quick succession through the mind of Will Marks, and
adding a shadowy dread to that distrust and watchfulness which his
situation inspired, rendered it, upon the whole, sufficiently
uncomfortable.
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