Under the ravening madness of famine, legal restraints and moral principles were forgotten, and famine riots broke out.  For, studded over the country were a number of farmers with bursting granaries, who could afford to keep their provisions in large quantities until a year of scarcity and high prices arrived; and the people, exasperated beyond endurance, saw long lines of provision carts on their way to the neighbouring harbours for exportation.

Such was the extraordinary fact!

Day after day, vessels laden with Irish provisions, drawn from a population perishing with actual hunger, and with pestilence which it occasioned, were passing out of our ports, whilst other vessels came in freighted with our provisions sent back, through the charity of England, to our relief.

Goaded by suffering, hordes of people turned out to intercept meal-carts and provision vehicles, and carts and cars were stopped on the highways, and the food which they carried openly taken away.

Sarah M’Gowan herself went to the Daltons, where typhus and starvation were doing their worst, to render what service she could, and Mave Sullivan would have done the same but for the entreaties of her parents, who feared the terrible fever.

The Black Prophet alone went on his way unmoved, scheming to accomplish his vile ends.  It was not enough for him that Mave was to be abducted; he had also planned a robbery for the same night, and was further resolved to procure the conviction of old Condy Dalton for the almost forgotten murder of Sullivan in the glen.

M’Gowan was driven to this last step by his own disturbed mind.  The disappearance of the tobacco-box troubled him, for on seeking it under the thatch it was no longer there, and the discovery by his wife of a skeleton buried near their cabin caused him still greater uneasiness.  Then Sarah had followed him one night, when he was walking in his sleep, to the secret grave of the murdered man, and though the Prophet did not say anything on that occasion to incriminate himself, he was vexed by the occurrence.

So, on the information of Donnel M’Gowan, and a man called Roddy Duncan, who was deep in the Prophet’s subtle villainies, the skeleton was dug up, and old Condy Dalton arrested.

“It’s the will of God!” replied the old man, when the police-officers entered his unhappy dwelling, and charged him with the murder of Bartholomew Sullivan.  “It’s God’s will, an’ I won’t consale it any longer.  Take me away.  I’m guilty—­I’m guilty!”

Sarah was ministering to the Daltons at the very time when her father was informing against old Condy, and was present when the police took him away in custody.  Shortly afterwards, when she had left the house, she was struck down by typhus.

In a shed that simply consisted of a few sticks laid up against the side of a ditch, with the remnant of some loose straw for bedding, Mave Sullivan found the suffering girl, with no other pillow than a sod of earth.