it was only when
Sullivan, promising to explain all, came over and shook hands with him,
and asked his pardon, that the old man understood he was innocent.

The Prophet looked with mortification rather than wonder at Sullivan;
then a shadow settled on his countenance, and he muttered to himself, "I
am doomed! Something drove me to this."

The trial was quickly ended. Sullivan's brother and several jurors
established his identity, and Condy Dalton was discharged.

The judge then ordered the Prophet and Roddy Duncan to be taken into
custody, and an indictment of perjury to be prepared at once. The graver
charge of murder was, however, brought against M'Gowan, the murder of a
carman named Peter Magennis, and the following day he found himself in
the very dock where Dalton had stood.

_V.--Fate: the Discoverer_

The trial of Donnel M'Gowan brought several strange things to light. It
was proved that the Prophet's real name was McIvor, that he had a wife
living, and that this wife was a sister to the murdered carman, Peter
Magennis. After the murder, McIvor fled to America with his daughter,
and his wife lost sight of him. She had only returned to these parts
recently, and she identified the skeleton of her brother because of a
certain malformation of the foot.

Then a pedlar, known in the neighbourhood as Toddy Mack, deposed that he
had given Magennis a steel tobacco-box with the letters "P. M." punched
on it.

It was Roddy Duncan who had seen this tobacco-box put under the thatch,
and he, knowing nothing of its history, had given it to Sarah M'Gowan,
who equally ignorant, had given it to a young man who called himself
Hanlon, but was in fact the son of Magennis.

On the night of the murder the unhappy woman, whom Sarah called
stepmother, and who lived with the Black Prophet, saw the tobacco-box in
M'Gowan's hands, and it contained a roll of bank-notes. When she asked
how he came by it, he gave her a note, and said, "There's all the
explanation you can want."

The chain of circumstantial evidence was sufficient to establish the
Prophet's guilt, and the judge passed the capital sentence.

The Prophet heard his doom without flinching, and only turned to the
gaoler to say, "Now that everything is over, the sooner I get to my cell
the betther. I have despised the world too long to care a single curse
what it says or thinks about me."

Sarah, who heard of her father's fate while she lay dying, tended by
Mave Su