“Do you give me one in the manetime.  What about the Box I want?  Spake the truth, if you regard your health.”

“I know nothing about your box, an’ I wish I could say as much of yourself.  However, I won’t long trouble you, that I can tell you—­ay, an’ her too.  She needn’t fear that I’ll be long undher the same roof wid her.  I know, any way, I wouldn’t be safe.  She would only stick me in one of her fits, now that she’s able to fight me.”

“Now, Nelly,” said the Prophet, deliberately shutting the door, “I know you to be a hardened woman, that has little fear in your heart.  I think you know me, too, to be a hardened and a determined man.  There, now, I have shut an’ boulted the door an’ by Him that made me, you’ll never lave this house, nor go out of that door a livin’ woman, unless you tell me all you know about that Tobaccy-Box.  Now you know my mind an’ my coorse—­act as you like now.”

“Ha, ha, ha!  Do you think to frighten me?” she asked, laughing derisively.  “Me!—­oh, how much you’re mistaken, if you think so!  Not that I don’t believe you to be dangerous, an’ a man that one ought to fear; but I have no fear of you.”

“Answer me quickly,” he replied—­and as he spoke, he seized the very same knife from which she had so narrowly escaped in her conflict with Sarah—­“answer me, I say; an’ mark, I have no reason to wish you alive.”

And as he spoke, the glare in his eyes flashed and became fearful.

“Ah,” said she, “there’s your daughter’s look an’ the same knife, too, that was near doin’ for me wanst.  Well, don’t think that it’s fear makes me say what I’m goin’ to say; but that’s the same knife; an’ besides I dhramed last night that I was dressed in a black cloak—­an’ a black cloak, they say, is death!  Ay, death—­an’ I know I’m not fit to die, or to meet judgment, an’ you know that too.  Now, then, tell me what it is you want wid the Box.”

[Illustration:  PAGE 847—­ I’ll tell you nothing about it]

“No,” he replied, sternly and imperatively, “I’ll tell you nothing about it; but get it at wanst, before my passion rises higher and deadlier.”

“Well, then, mark me, I’m not afeard of you—­but I have the box.”

“An’ how did you come by it?” he asked.

“Sarah was lookin’ for a cobweb to stop the blood where she cut me in our fight the other day, an’ it came tumblin’ out of a cranny in the wall.”

“An’ where is it now?”

“I’ll get it for you,” she replied; “but you must let me out first.”

“Why so?”

“Because it’s not in the house.”

“An’ where is it?  Don’t think you’ll escape me.”

“It’s in the thatch o’ the roof.”

The Prophet deliberately opened the door, and catching her by the shoulder, held her prisoner, as it were, until she should make her words good.  The roof was but low, and she knew the spot too well to make any mistake about it.