e disaffected party. This was the work of Crofts,
who knew and felt that Fortescue was the great barrier between himself
and a large fortune. For this purpose Mulcahy was hired; to this end the
whole long train of perfidy laid, which eventuated in his ruin: for
so artfully had the plot been devised, each day's occurrence rendered
retreat more difficult, until at last it became impossible.

The reader is already aware of the catastrophe which concluded his
career in the rebel army. It only remains now to be told that he escaped
to America, where he entered as a sailor on board a merchantman;
and although his superior acquirements and conduct might have easily
bettered his fortune in his new walk in life, the dread of detection
never left his mind, and he preferred the hardships before the mast to
the vacillation of hope and fear a more conspicuous position would have
exposed him to.

The vessel in which he served was wrecked off the coast of New Holland,
and he and a few others of the crew were taken up by an English ship on
her voyage outward. In a party sent on shore for water, Fortescue came
up with Darby, who had made his escape from the convict settlement, and
was wandering about the woods, almost dead of starvation, and scarcely
covered with clothing. His pitiful condition, but perhaps more still,
his native drollery, which even then was unextinguished, induced the
sailors to yield to Fortescue's proposal, and they smuggled him on
board in a water cask; and thus concealed, he made the entire voyage to
England, where he landed about a fortnight before the trial. Fearful of
being apprehended before the day, and determined at all hazards to give
his evidence, he lay hid till the time we have already seen, when he
suddenly came forward to my rescue.

Mulcahy, who worked in the same gang with Darby, or, to use the piper's
grandiloquent expression,--for he burst out in this occasionally,--was
"in concatenated proximity to him," told the whole story of his own
baseness, and loudly inveighed against Crofts for deserting him in
his misfortunes. The pocket-book taken from Crofts by Darby amply
corroborated this statement. It contained, besides various memoranda
in the owner's handwriting, several letters from Mulcahy, detailing the
progress of the conspiracy: some were in acknowledgment of considerable
sums of money; others asking for supplies; but all confirmatory of the
black scheme by which Fortescue's destruction was c