It was Roddy Duncan who had seen this tobacco-box put under the thatch, and he, knowing nothing of its history, had given it to Sarah M’Gowan, who equally ignorant, had given it to a young man who called himself Hanlon, but was in fact the son of Magennis.

On the night of the murder the unhappy woman, whom Sarah called stepmother, and who lived with the Black Prophet, saw the tobacco-box in M’Gowan’s hands, and it contained a roll of bank-notes.  When she asked how he came by it, he gave her a note, and said, “There’s all the explanation you can want.”

The chain of circumstantial evidence was sufficient to establish the Prophet’s guilt, and the judge passed the capital sentence.

The Prophet heard his doom without flinching, and only turned to the gaoler to say, “Now that everything is over, the sooner I get to my cell the betther.  I have despised the world too long to care a single curse what it says or thinks about me.”

Sarah, who heard of her father’s fate while she lay dying, tended by Mave Sullivan and her newly-discovered mother, sent the condemned man a last message.  “Say that his daughter, if she was able, would be with him through shame, an’ disgrace, an’ death; that she’d scorn the world for him; an’ that because he said once in his life that he loved her, she’d forgive him all a thousand times, an’ would lay down her life for him.”

The acquittal of old Condy Dalton, who for years had tortured himself with remorse, believing he had killed Sullivan, and never understanding the disappearance of the body, and the resurrection of honest Bartle Sullivan, filled all the countryside with delight.

Thanks to the money of his friend, Toddy Mack, Dalton was once more re-established in a farm that he had been compelled to relinquish, and when sickness and the severity of winter passed away Mave and young Condy Dalton were happily married.

Roddy Duncan was transported for perjury.  Bartle Sullivan, on the first social evening that the two families, the Sullivans and the Daltons, spent together after the trial, cleared up the mystery of his disappearance.

“I remimber fightin’,” he said, “wid Condy on that night, and the devil’s own battle it was.  We went into a corner of the field near the Grey Stone to decide it.  All at wanst I forgot what happened, till I found myself lyin’ upon a car wid the McMahons that lived ten or twelve miles beyond the mountains.  Well, I felt disgraced at bein’ beaten by Con Dalton, and as I was fond of McMahon’s sister, what ’ud you have us but off we went together to America, for, you see, she promised to marry me if I’d go.  Well, she an’ I married when we got to Boston, and Toddy here, who took to the life of a pedlar, came back with a good purse and lived wid us.  At last I began to long for home, and so we all came together.  An’, thank God, we were all in time to clear the innocent, and punish the guilty; ay, an’ reward the good, too, eh, Toddy?”