240 Old Stories
She purred around very friendly, rubbing up against the man, and trotting along on the log he was sawing. Finally she got to fooling around the saw, and got a claw cut off. Then she ran away up the hill toward the man’s house. When the man got through work, and went home, he found his wife had one of her fingers done up. He asked her what the matter was, and she wouldn’t tell him. But he kept at her, and after a while she let him see her hand. One finger was cut clean off. Then the man knew his wife was a witch, and that she was that same black cat which got its claw sawed off at the mill.
how to kill a witch
It was a common trick in the olden time of such women as were witches to turn into cats, and go scooting along the top rails of fences. It was useless trying to shoot these witch cats with any ordinary load. Leaden bullets would not touch them. To kill them, the gun had to be loaded with a silver ball. It was needful for the person who went witch-killing to use great care about his ammunition; for they said about the ball, that,—
