“You see, that if you go to that I have the advantage of you.”

“Tell me,” I repeat, “what has become of Mr. Fenton, from whom you took it.”

“Fenton!” exclaimed the other, with surprise; “is that the poor young man that’s not right in his head?”

“The same.”

“Well, I know nothing about him.”

“Did you not rob him of this note?”

“No.”

“You did, sir; this note was in his possession; and I fear you have murdered him I besides.  You must come with me,”—­and as he spoke, our friend, Trailcudgel, saw two pistols, one in each hand, levelled at him.  “Get on before me, sir, to the town of Ballytrain, or, resist at your peril.”

Almost at the same moment the two pistols, taken from Sir Thomas Gourlay, were levelled at the stranger.

“Now,” said the man, whilst his eyes shot fire and his brow darkened, “if it must be, it must; I only want the sheddin’ of blood to fill up my misery and guilt; but it seems I’m doomed, and I can’t help it.  Sir,” said he, “think of yourself.  If I submit to become your prisoner, my life’s gone.  You don’t know the villain you are goin’ to hand me over to.  I’m not afraid of you, nor of anything, but to die a disgraceful death through his means, as I must do.”

“I will hear no reasoning on the subject,” replied the other; “go on before me.”

The man kept his pistols presented, and there they stood, looking sternly into each other’s faces, each determined not to yield, and each, probably, on the brink of eternity.

At length the man dropped the muzzles of the weapons, and holding them reversed, approached the stranger, saying, in a voice and with an expression of feeling that smote the other to the heart,

“I will be conqueror still, sir!  Instead of goin’ with you, you will come with me.  There are my pistols.  Only come to a house of misery and sorrow and death, and you will know all.”

“This is not treachery,” thought the stranger.  “There can be no mistaking the anguish—­the agony—­of that voice; and those large tears bear no testimony to the crime of murder or robbery.”

“Take my pistols, sir,” the other repeated, “only follow me.”

“No,” replied the stranger, “keep them:  I fear you not—­and what is more, I do not now even suspect you.  Here are thirty shillings in silver—­but you must allow me to’ keep this note.”

We need not describe anew the scene to which poor Trailcudgel introduced him.  It is enough to say, that since his last appearance in our pages he had lost two more of his children, one by famine and the other by fever; and that when the stranger entered his hovel—­that libel upon a human habitation—­that disgrace to landlord inhumanity—­he saw stretched out in the stillness of death the emaciated bodies of not less than four human beings—­to wit, this wretched man’s wife, their daughter, a sweet girl nearly grown,—­and two little ones.