"Don't stop me, for the Lord's sake! O'Donnegan, the landlord, has killed young Keats, the only son of Colonel Keats! I am running to fetch his father!"
"Heavens and earth! another murder within that accursed house! That is the third!" exclaimed the questioner, in a voice of horror.
The men separated in opposite directions, the one running toward the town, the other toward the scene of the outrage. The same questions and the same answers were quietly heard between other meeting parties, who separated, running in opposite ways, as the first had done. The dreadful news was thus confirmed.
We drew back our heads and looked each other in the face in consternation. We knew none of the parties concerned, yet we could not compose ourselves to sleep that night.
The next day was a terrible one to the friends of the murdered and the murderer.
Once more—the third time—a coroner's inquest sat upon a dead body at the Willow Cottage. But this time their verdict, made up after a careful investigation and patient deliberation, was of a more fatal character. It was that "The deceased came to his death by blows upon the head from a bludgeon in the hands of Patrick O'Donnegan."
O'Donnegan, who was under arrest, awaiting the verdict, was then fully committed to stand his trial at the approaching session of the criminal court.
The establishment at the Willow Cottage was broken up, the furniture sold, the house closed, and the premises once more advertised for rent. But now with the bad odor hanging around the place, no one wished to take it, and the house remained idle upon the proprietor's hands.
Meantime the trial of O'Donnegan approached. He was arraigned, convicted and sentenced, in a shorter space of time than I ever heard of in the trial of any criminal. Many people thought that the prosecution was conducted in a vindictive spirit, and that the friends of the deceased exerted every faculty, sparing neither influence nor expense in the pursuit of a conviction. They retained the best counsel in the country to assist the State's attorney, while on the other hand the poor wretch of a prisoner had no defense except that appointed for him by the court. However that might be, in the short space of one month from the time of committing the homicide, he was sentenced to die, and in six weeks from his conviction he expiated his crime upon the scaffold.
It was about the middle of September, of that eventful year, when a rumor arose—as all rumors arise, mysteriously—that the Willow Cottage was haunted; that ghostly lights flitted through its chambers; that ghostly revelers held midnight orgies in its deserted halls; and that the murderer and the murdered still played their game at ninepins, or waged their last war along its lonely corridors.