Ten years earlier, a Salem potter had once said that if people did not stop quarrelling, Salem would never become a town.
Sarah Ruck's marriage had been an unhappy one. Her first husband had married two women at the same time. After legally dissolving her marriage to him in 1664, she married William Hassan, the brother of Judge Hassan. George Burroughs was, in a sense, her third husband.
Unlike that husband of hers, who had always narrowly escaped Native American attacks, Sarah was an ordinary woman. Yet the places her husband went were no places for an ordinary woman, and she lived in fear every day.
That fear came not only from the war, but from her husband as well. George Burroughs was a short, dark-haired man who was exceedingly strict with his wife. While living with the Putnams, people had often seen Burroughs berating his first wife. With Sarah, he had made her believe that he and God watched her every move at all times.
Even before King William's War had ended, no one held much hope that she would return alive. The executioners remained unmoved by the anguished pleas of women and children. Columns of smoke, merciless flames, gunfire, cries, and the sounds of slaughter formed a hellish scene. That girl who loved strawberries could not have survived in such an environment.
As the government forces suffered one defeat after another, Salem's militia began keeping watch as well. Mary Walcott's father had been busy drilling troops. And even if they were not fighting Indians, there was another group they had to guard against: soldiers from the mother country. Increase Mather had been in Britain for three years. Three years earlier, a man named Andros had passed through Salem with a large retinue and provocatively asked the old pastor