“Here,” said she, “is the cross I scraped on the stone undher the place.”

She put up her hand as she spoke, and searched the spot—­but in vain.  There certainly was the cross as she had marked it, and there was the slight excavation under the thatch where it had been; but as for the box itself, all search for it was fruitless—­it had disappeared.

CHAPTER XVII. —­ National Calamity—­Sarah in Love and Sorrow.

The astonishment of the Prophet’s wife on discovering that the Tobacco-box had been removed from the place of its concealment was too natural to excite any suspicion of deceit or falsehood on her part, and he himself, although his disappointment was dreadful on finding that it had disappeared, at once perceived that she had been perfectly ignorant of its removal.  With his usual distrust and want of confidence, however, he resolved to test her truth a little further, lest by any possibility she might have deceived him.

“Now, Nelly,” said he sternly, “mark me—­is this the way you produce the box?  You acknowledge that you had it—­that you hid it even—­an’ now, when I tell you I want it, an’ that it may be a matther of life an’ death to me—­you purtend its gone, an’ that you know nothing about it—­I say again, mark me well—­produce the box!”

“Here,” she replied, chafed and indignant as well at its disappearance as at the obstinacy of his suspicions—­“here’s my throat—­dash your knife into it, if you like—­but as for the box, I tell you, that although I did put it in there, you know as much about it now as I do.”

“Well,” said he, “for wanst I believe you—­but mark me still—­this box munt be gotten, an’ it’s to you I’ll look for it.  That’s all—­you know me.”

“Ay,” she replied, “I know you.”

“Eh—­what do you mane by that?” he asked—­“what do you know? come now; I say, what do you know?”

“That you’re a hardened and a bad man:—­oh! you needn’t brandish your knife—­nor your eyes needn’t blaze up that way, like your daughter’s,” she added, “except that you’re hard an’ dark, and widout one spark o’ common feelin’, I know nothin’ particularly wicked about you—­but, at the same time, I suspect enough.”

“What do you suspect, you hardened vagabond?”

“It doesn’t matther what I suspect,” she answered; “only I think you’d have bad heart for anything—­so go about your business, for I want to have nothing more either to do or say to you—­an’ I wish to glory I had been always of that way o’ thinkin’, a chiernah!—­many a scalded heart I’d a missed that I got by you.”

She then walked into the cabin, and the Prophet slowly followed her with his fixed, doubtful and suspicious eye, after which he flung the knife on the threshold, and took his way, in a dark and disappointed mood, towards Glendhu.