Martin bore, and his previous
pursuits, were enough to condemn him, independently of the startling
evidence that I, and others from among his own wild companions, had
given against him. A conversation that one of these men had accidentally
heard between him and Adam Hows, proclaiming their intention to rob and
murder Mr. Carlos, was indeed more conclusive of their guilt than my own
account, though that was sufficient to have hung him twice over.

Bill kept his eye fixed on me during the examination. I met it with a
degree of outward calmness; but it thrilled me to the soul, and has
haunted me ever since. He made no attempt at vindication. He said that
the evidence brought against him was circumstantially correct, yet, for
all that, neither he nor his accomplice had actually murdered the
Squire, and that God, who looked deeper than man, knew that what he said
was true.

Of course no one listened to such an absurd statement. But, to cut this
painful part of my story short--for it is agony to dwell upon it--he was
tried, condemned, and finally executed at ----. I saw him hung.

Yes, Reader, you may well start back from the page in horror. To be sure
that my victim was dead, I actually witnessed his last struggles, and
returned home satisfied that the tongue I most dreaded upon earth--the
only living creature who suspected my guilt--was silenced and cold for
ever.

Shallow fool that I was! Conscience never sleeps! The voice of remorse
sounds up from the lowest deeps, with the clang of the archangel's trump
blasting the guilty ear with its judgment-peal. With him, my peace of
mind, self-respect, and hopes of heaven, vanished for ever!

I have since often thought, that God gave me this last chance in order
to try me--to see if any good remained in me--if I could for once
resist temptation, and act towards Martin as an honest man. I have felt,
amid the burning agonies of my sleepless, phantom-haunted nights, that,
had I confessed my guilt and saved him from destruction, the same pity
that Christ extended to the thief on the cross might have been shown to
me.

These dreadful events were the beginning of sorrows. When Mr. Walter
came to the Hall to attend his uncle's funeral, and the will of the
deceased was opened by the man of business, and read to him after the
melancholy ceremony was over, it was found that Mr. Carlos had named me
in this document as _his natural son by Anne Cotton_, and had left me
the house in which