“Are you the son, then, of the man who is said to have been murdered?” asked the judge.

“He was his son,” he replied, “and came first to that part of the country in consequence of having been engaged in a Party fight in his native place.  It seems a warrant had been issued against him and others, and he thought it more prudent to take his mother’s name, which was Hanlon, in order to avoid discovery, the case being a very common one under circumstances of that kind.”

Rody Duncan’s explanation, with respect to the Tobacco-Box, was not called for on the trial, but we shall give it here in order to satisfy the reader.  He saw Nelly M’Gowan, as we may still call her, thrusting something under the thatch of the cabin, and feeling a kind of curiosity to ascertain what it could be, he seized the first opportunity of examining, and finding a tobacco-box, he put it in his pocket, and thought himself extremely fortunate in securing it, for reasons which the reader will immediately understand.  The truth is, that Rody, together with about half a dozen virtuous youths in the neighborhood, were in the habit of being out pretty frequently at night—­for what purposes we will not now wait to inquire.  Their usual place of rendezvous was the Grey Stone, in consequence of the shelter and concealment which its immense projections afforded them.  On the night of the first meeting between Sarah and Hanlon, Rody had heard the whole conversation by accident, whilst waiting for his companions, and very judiciously furnished the groans, as he did also upon the second night, on both occasions for his own amusement.  His motives for ingratiating himself through means of the box, with Sarah and Hanlon, are already known to the reader, and require no further explanation from us.

In fact, such a train of circumstantial evidence was produced, as completely established the Prophet’s guilt, in the opinion of all who had heard the trial, and the result was a verdict of guilty by the jury, and a sentence of death by the judge.

“Your case,” said the judge, as he was about to pronounce sentence, “is another proof of the certainty with which Providence never, so to speak, loses sight of the man who deliberately sheds his fellow creature’s blood.  It is an additional and striking instance too, of the retributive spirit with which it converts all the most cautious disguises of guilt, no matter how ingeniously assumed, into the very manifestations by which its enormity is discovered and punished.”

After recommending him to a higher tribunal, and impressing upon him the necessity of repentance, and seeking peace with God, he sentenced him to be hanged by the neck on the fourth day after the close of the assizes, recommending his soul, as usual, to the mercy of his Creator.

The Prophet was evidently a man of great moral intrepidity and firmness.  He kept his black, unquailing eye fixed upon the judge while he spoke, but betrayed not a single symptom of a timid or vacillating spirit.  When the sentence was pronounced, he looked with an expression of something like contempt upon those who had broken out, as usual, into those murmurs of compassion and satisfaction, which are sometimes uttered under circumstances similar to his.