however, being better as to facts than to time, was such as prevented her from determining whether the incidents alluded to had occurred previous to Sullivan’s murder, or afterwards.  There remained, however, just enough of suspicion to torment her own mind, without enabling her to arrive at any satisfactory conclusion as to Donnel’s positive guilt, arising from the mysterious incidents in question.  A kind of awakened conscience, too, resulting not from any principle of true repentance, but from superstitious alarm and a conviction that the Prophet had communicated to Sarah a certain secret connected with her, which she dreaded so much to have known, had for some time past rendered her whole life a singular compound of weak terror, ill-temper, gloom, and a kind of conditional repentance, which depended altogether upon the fact of her secret being known.  In this mood it was that she left the cabin as we have described.

“I’m not fit to die,” she said to herself, after she had gone—­“an’ that’s the second offer for my life she has made.  Any way, it’s the best of my play to lave them; an’ above all, to keep away from her.  That’s the second attempt; and I know to a certainty, that if she makes a third one, it’ll do for me.  Oh, no doubt of that—­the third time’s always the charm!—­an’ into my heart that unlucky knife ’ill go, if she ever tries it a third time!  They tell me,” she proceeded, soliloquizing, as she was in the habit of doing, “that the inquest is to be held in a day or two, an’ that the crowner was only unwell a trifle, and hadn’t the sickness afther all.  No matther—­not all the wather in the sky ’ud clear my mind that there’s not villany joined with that Tobaccy-box, though where it could go, or what could come of it (barrin’ the devil himself or the fairies tuck it,) I don’t know.”

So far as concerned the coroner, the rumor of his having caught the prevailing typhus was not founded on fact.  A short indisposition, arising from a cold caught by a severe wetting, but by no means of a serious or alarming nature, was his only malady; and when the day to which the inquest had been postponed had arrived, he was sufficiently recovered to conduct that important investigation.  A very large crowd was assembled upon the occasion, and a deep interest prevailed throughout that part of the country.  The circumstances, however, did not, as it happened, admit of any particular difficulty Jerry Sullivan and his friends attended as, was their duty, in order to give evidence touching the identity of the body.  This, however, was a matter of peculiar difficulty.  On disinterring the remains, it was found that the clothes worn at the time of the murder had not been buried with them—­in other words, that the body had been stripped of all but the under garment, previous to its interment.  The evidence, nevertheless, of the Black Prophet and of Red Rody was conclusive.  The truth, however, of most if not of all the details, but not of the fact itself, was denied by old Dalton,