“I did.  Can you tell me anything about that curious spot?”

“No; nothing but that it was the dwelling of an Indian woman, who pretended to second sight, and who should have been sent to the State’s prison as a felon, or, at the very least, to the madhouse as a lunatic.  She was burned out, or perhaps burned herself out, and vanished on the same night that Governor Rothsay disappeared.  She was in some way cognizant of a plot against him that would prevent him from ever entering upon the duties of his office.  I, in my capacity as magistrate, issued a warrant for her arrest, but it was too late.  She was gone.  It is said by some people that she is a Mexican Indian, who had been very beautiful in her youth, and who had become infatuated with an English tourist who admired her to such a degree that he married her—­according to the rites of her nation.  He was a false hearted caitiff, if he was an English lord.  Having committed the folly of marrying the Indian woman, he should have been true to her—­made the best of the bad bargain.  Instead of which he grew tired of her, and finally abandoned her.”

“Did he return to his native country, do you know?”

“He did not.  She never gave him time.  She went mad after he left her, followed him to New Orleans and tomahawked him on the steamboat.  She was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and sent to a lunatic asylum.  After a time she was discharged, or she escaped.  It is not known which; most probably she escaped, as she certainly was not cured.  She was as mad as a March hare all the time she lived here; but as she was harmless—­comparatively harmless—­it seemed nobody’s business to have her shut up!  And as I said, when at last I thought it was time to have her arrested on a charge of vagrancy, it was too late.  She had fled.”

“Why do you suspect that she had some knowledge of a plot to make away with the governor-elect?”

“I suspect that she was in the plot.  Developments have led me to the conclusion.  By these I learned that Rothsay was not murdered, as his friends feared, nor abducted, as some persons believed, but that he went away, and lived for many months among the Indians in the wilderness, without giving a sign of his identity to the people among whom he lived, or sending a hint of his whereabouts, or even of his existence, to his anxious friends.  But that the massacre of Terrepeur—­in which he was murdered and his hut was burned—­occurred when it did, we might never have learned his fate.”

“Yet, still, I cannot see the ground upon which you suspect this Indian woman of complicity in the man’s disappearance,” said Cumbervale.

“But I am coming to that.  Scythia was a Mexican Indian.  It is well known to travelers that the Mexican Indians possess the secret of a drug which, when administered to a man, will not kill him, or do him any physical harm, but will reduce him to a state of abject imbecility, so that his free will is destroyed, and he may be led by any one who may wish to lead him.  This drug administered to Rothsay, by the woman, must have so deprived him of his reason as to induce him to follow any one influencing him.”