"Then, who gave her the poison?"
"I do not know."
"And cannot even suspect any one?"
"No."
"Good-bye!" he said, as he started up and hurried away; muttering to himself, as the jailer undid the bolts, "Always the same!—the women are always innocent; and yet we see them stretching ropes other than clothes' ropes every now and then."
Defeated, but as little discomfited, as we might gather from his pithy soliloquy, his next step was to double up, as he termed it, the authorities, who, he knew, would never have gone the length of apprehending the woman without having got hold of evidence sufficient to justify Sir William Rae, the Lord Advocate, a considerate and prudent man, that the charge lay heavy on the prisoner. He had no right of access, at this stage, to the names of the intended witnesses; but to a man of his activity it is no difficult matter to find these out, from the natural garrulity of the people, and a kind of self-importance in being a Crown testimony. Then to find them out was next to drawing them out; for it may be safely said for our writer that there was no man, from the time of John Wilkes, who could exercise a more winning persuasion. One by one he ferreted them out, wheedled, threatened, adjured, but found himself resisted in every attempt to break them down or to turn them to him. At every stage of his inquiry he saw the case for the prisoner assuming a dark aspect—as dark, he so termed it, as the face of a hanged culprit.
"The beagles have got a track. There are more foxes in the cover than one; and shall it be said I, David M——, cannot beat out another as stimulating to the nose?"
In a quarter of an hour after having made this observation to himself, he was posting on horseback to the farm of D——, where he arrived in as short a time as he generally took on his journeys.
"I am afraid to ask you for intelligence," said the farmer, as he stood by the horse's side, and addressed the writer, who kept his seat.
"Get me two and five-eighths of a glass of whisky in a jug of milk, and I'll tell you then what I want. I have no time to dismount."