Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/163

 they had been branded there with a hot iron, and as they undressed her they found other scars like them on the tops and soles of her feet and one on her right side just below her breast; and on her brow under the fringe of thick red hair were other scars that might have been burned there by placing on her head a crown of jagged hot metal. On her back were the healed blue scars of flogging. But they could get from her no answer as to how she came by these scars. Though clearly they were the scars of wounds, she led them craftily to believe that she had been born thus.

Awed a little and unable to find even a suspicion of her guilt, they let her go back in peace to the old house behind the lilacs, following close behind her in order to search the place. In the bare small room where Uriah Spragg had slept they found a long cruel blacksnake whip and across the hall in the room of Miss Annie Spragg they discovered a strange contrivance which at first puzzled them. It consisted of a rusty pump-chain, fastened in the middle to one of the beams in the ceiling just above the bed. To the two ends were attached crude handcuffs fastened with locks equally crude. They questioned Miss Annie Spragg for two hours and at the end of that time they learned that Uriah Spragg had locked her into the handcuffs each night after she had gone to bed. Only on three nights a year when he had gone to the church convention was she free.

At the back of the house a crowd of curious gathered once more, peering in at the windows and breaking down the cellar door, for the mob no longer looked upon Annie Spragg as a human creature with