who had sufficiently recovered from his illness, to
be present at the investigation. The circumstances
deposed to by the two witnesses were sufficiently
strong and home to establish the fact against him,
although he impugned the details as we have stated,
but admitted that—after a hard battle with
weighty sticks, he did kill Sullivan with an unlucky
blow, and left him dead in a corner of the field for
a short time near the Grey Stone. He said that
he did not bury the body, but that he carried it soon
afterwards from the field in which the unhappy crime
had been committed, to the roadside, where he laid
it for a time, in order to procure assistance.
He said he then changed his mind, and having become
afraid to communicate the unhappy accident to any
of the neighbors, he fled in great terror across the
adjoining mountains, where he wandered nearly frantic
until the approach of day-break the next morning.
He then felt himself seized with an uncontrollable
anxiety to return to the scene of conflict, which he
did, and found, not much to his surprise indeed, that
the body had been removed, for he supposed at the
time that Sullivan’s friends must have brought
it home. This he declared was the truth, neither
more nor less, and he concluded by solemnly stating,
that he knew no more than the child unborn what had
become of the body, or how it disappeared. He
also acknowledged that he was very much intoxicated
at the time of the quarrel, and that were it not for
the shock he received by perceiving that the man was
dead, he thought he would not have had anything beyond
a confused and indistinct recollection of the circumstance
at all. He admitted also that he had threatened
Sullivan in the market, and followed him closely for
the purpose of beating him, but maintained that the
fatal blow was not given with an intention of taking
his life.
The fact, on the contrary, that the body had been
privately buried and stripped before interment, was
corroborated by the circumstance of Sullivan’s
body-coat having been found the next morning in a torn
and bloody state, together with his great coat and
hat; but indeed, the impression upon the minds of
many was, that Dalton’s version of the circumstances
was got up for the purpose of giving to what was looked
upon as a deliberate assassination, the character of
simple homicide or manslaughter, so as that he might
escape the capital felony, and come off triumphantly
by a short imprisonment. The feeling against him
too was strengthened and exasperated by the impetuous
resentment with which he addressed himself to the
Prophet and Rody Duncan, while giving their evidence,
for it was not unreasonable to suppose that the man,
who at his years, and in such awful circumstances,
could threaten the lives of the witnesses against
him, as he did, would not hesitate to commit, in a
fit of that ungovernable passion that had made him
remarkable through life, the very crime with which
he stood charged through a similar act of blind and