Mrs. Yost heard the sentence, and burst into passionate weeping, clasping the fast-paling face of her dying husband in her two hands, and kissing his livid lips as if her caresses might renew his short lease of life. “Do you understand?” said the physician. “You are sure to leave us in a very short time—possibly in one moment! Tell me, before it is too late, all you know of your murderers!” The dying man’s fast-glazing eyes slowly opened and stared vacantly in the face of his friend. But he recognized the necessity for action. “I know,” he answered, in German, “I know! You want the whole truth!” “Yes!” “Well! I was just outening the light when two men made up to me and fired! They came down from the direction of the cemetery, and, when they had done their work on me, ran back in the same way. They were two Irishmen. I truly think they shot me by mistake, meaning to kill McCarron, there! They had threatened him, and he was afraid he would get it. They were two strangers. Still, I should not say that, for I have seen them before. They were both down at Jim Carroll’s—a party of them—last night, and Barney pointed them out to me, or I showed them to him—I can’t tell which, now—as we went by Carroll’s!” This was all that the dying man could say just then. After resting a space, during which his faithful mate knelt at the side of the sofa and bathed his brow with her tears, he motioned McCarron, who stood nigh, to move up closer, and said to him: “Barney, who were those men that I pointed out to you—or you pointed out to me—which was it?—as we passed Jim Carroll’s saloon, last night? Didn’t you remark, ‘They’re fellows from the other side?’” By “the other side,” Tamaqua people described the country the other side of, or beyond, the Schuylkill. McCarron bowed his head and assented. He remembered the time and event, but did not know the men. To all his friends, Mr. Shindel, Mr. Lebo, Mr. Shepp—the latter his brother-in-law—Mr. Houser, and others, the policeman made precisely similar declarations, knowing that he must die. He did not want to accuse anybody unjustly. To Dr. Solliday, who questioned him once more, he said: “One was a large man, and the other was smaller!” “Was not one Jimmy Kerrigan?” “No! He was larger! Kerrigan was not there! If so, I did not see him! And I had been with Kerrigan just before, at the United States Hotel, where he drank with me! Oh, no! He didn’t do it!” “Was it Duffy?” The doctor was aware that Yost had had trouble with a man by that name. “I am sure none of our men did it! They were strangers, believe me!” To his brother-in-law, Daniel Shepp, the prostrate and dying man said, as he closely held his hands, and the life-blood slowly ebbed from his side: “Oh, Dan! To think that I served so long in the army, was in so many hard-fought battles, and escaped all the bullets, to die now innocently!”