“I'll give no explanation,” said he, “but this;” and turning his back to her, he opened a tobacco-box, which, by stretching her neck, she saw distinctly, and, taking out a roll of bank notes, he separated one from the rest, and handing it to her, exclaimed—“there's all the explanation you can want; a close mouth, Nelly, is the sign of a wise-head, an' by keepin' a close mouth, you'll get more explanations of this kind. Do you understand that?” said he. “I do,” she replied.
“Very well, then,” he observed “let that be the law and gospel between us.”
When he fell asleep, she got up, and looking at the box, saw that it was stuffed with bank notes, had a broken hinge—the hinge was freshly broken—and something like two letters on the lid of it.
“She then did not see it,” she continued, “until some weeks ago, when his daughter and herself having had a quarrel, in which the girl cut her—she (his daughter) on stretching up for some cobwebs on the wall to stanch the bleeding, accidentally pulled the box out of a crevice, in which it had been hid. About this time,” she added, “the prisoner became very restless at night, indeed, she might say by day and night, and after a good deal of gloomy ill temper, he made inquiries for it, and on hearing that it had again appeared, even threatened her life if it were not produced.” She closed her evidence by stating that she had secreted it, but could tell nothing of its ultimate and mysterious disappearance.
Hanlon's part in tracing the murder is already known, we presume, to the reader. He dreamt, but his dream was not permitted to go to the jury, that his father came to him, and said, that if he repaired to the Grey Stone, at Glendhu, on a night which he named, at the hour of twelve o'clock, he would get such a clue to his murder as would enable him to bring his murderer to justice.
“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.”