lonelier desolation. It mattered not what change of season came, the
place presented no appearance of man or his works. Neither bird or beast
was seen or heard, except rarely, within its dreary bosom, the only
sounds it knew being the monotonous murmurs of the mountain torrent, or
the wild echoes of the thunder storms that pealed among the hills about
it. Silence and solitude were the characteristics which predominated in
it and it would not be easy to say whether they were felt more during
the gloom of November or the glare of June.

In the mouth of this glen, not far from the cabin we have described, two
murders had been committed about twenty years before the period of our
narrative, within the lapse of a month. The one was that of a carman,
and the other of a man named Sullivan, who also had been robbed, as it
was supposed the carman had been, for the bodies of both had been made
way with and were never found. This was evident--in the one case by the
horse and cart of the carman remaining by the grey stone in question,
on which the traces of blood were long visible; and in the other by the
circumstance of Sullivan's hat and part of his coat having been found
near the cabin in question on the following day, in a field through
which his path home lay, and in which was a pool of blood, where his
foot-marks were deeply imprinted, as if in a struggle for life and
death. For this latter murder a man named Dalton had been taken up,
under circumstances of great suspicion, he having been the last person
seen in the man's company. Both had been drinking together in the
market, a quarrel had originated between them about money matters, blows
had been exchanged, and Dalton was heard to threaten him in very strong
language. Nor was this all. He had been observed following or rather
dogging him on his way home, and although the same road certainly led
to the residence of both, yet when his words and manner were taken into
consideration, added to the more positive proof that the footmarks left