To continue the barbarous record, on Saturday, the seventeenth of October, 1868, Alexander Rae, another mining superintendent, was killed on the wagon road, near Centralia, in the township of Conyngham, Columbia County. Several persons were distrusted, and a number arrested, charged with the crime, and a strong chain of circumstantial evidence made out by the Commonwealth against them. The highway on which the event occurred was that passing from Centralia to Mt. Carmel, in Northumberland County, and the exact location of the tragedy at a point distant about a mile and a half from the latter place, in the neighborhood of a spring where, for the convenience of travelers, there had been erected a rude watering-trough, so that men, as well as animals, might quench their thirst. Mr. Rae was riding in his buggy, at half-past nine o’clock in the morning, coming from his home, and going in the direction of the Coal Ridge Improvement Company’s colliery. He was a peaceable, inoffensive, but naturally fearless man, entirely unarmed, and only intent, at the time, on performing his duty to his employers in the pursuit of his regular calling. The fatal shots once discharged by the assassins, from their ambush near the road, the actors in the drama, without waiting to learn the result of their bloody work, fled precipitately to their refuge in the mountains, and for a long time entirely avoided capture, or even the shadow of suspicion. The lifeless remains of Mr. Rae were discovered, Sunday morning, pierced by six bullets, and resting near the spot where the attack had been made. As a natural consequence of such an outrage, the utmost indignation pervaded the community in which the victim had for years been a widely-known and much-respected resident. The particulars, as far as they were learned, were repeated from person to person, and the news spread like wildfire to the most distant parts of the coal country. Mr. Rae left an estimable widow and six children to mourn his death. John Duffy, of Mahanoy City, Schuylkill County, Michael Prior, of Branchdale, Thomas Donahue, of Ashland, both in the same county, and Pat Hester, of Mt. Carmel township, Northumberland County, _as was then believed_, were the assassins. Some change in this regard was made by subsequent events. Pat Hester was a married man, forty-five years of age, and had several young children. Prior was also married, said to be forty years of age. Donahue had a wife and one child, and was apparently forty-three. Duffy was a bachelor, of about twenty-five years. Thomas Dooley, of Palo Alto, Schuylkill County, standing, by his own confession, in the position of an accomplice in the wicked assassination, about a month after the commission of the deed gave out facts which caused the apprehension of the others just named. The cause came up, was heard on an application for a writ of _habeas corpus_, before Judge Kline, one of the Associates