Part 10

"A restatement of my theory may clear things up. Through a combination of certain circumstances, exerting upon him a peculiar influence, David is living again in an environment and through a set of experiences that belong to him only when he is in what we call a condition of secondary personality. Discover that environment--the same, I believe, as the one in which he was lost three years ago--and you will discover David."

Leighton made no comment. He regarded Raoul with characteristic immobility. One gathered from his silence, however, that he was impressed with what he had just heard. Slowly pacing the length of the sala, he stopped before General Herran, who, through his ignorance of English, was in a quite helpless state of bewilderment at the turn the interview between the two men had taken.

"This young man will help us find Meudon," said Leighton in his broken Spanish.

"He knows where he is?" asked Herran eagerly.

"He knows--something," replied the savant with significant emphasis. "For one thing, General, those pistol shots you had with Meudon seem to have played the devil."

"Caramba! Does he say so? But that is foolishness!"

"No, it is theory," said Leighton drily.

"How will he prove it?"

"By finding Meudon."

There was a finality in the tone of Leighton's rejoinder which, more than the words themselves, indicated the seeker's conviction that the road to David's discovery was in plain view. Raoul Arthur, however, said nothing. Standing aloof from his two visitors, apparently not heeding them, his silence aroused Leighton's curiosity.

"Naturally, I depend on you, Arthur," said the old man, with an emphasis that sounded like a threat.

"I don't know why," he demurred. "David was with your party when this happened. I failed to find him three years ago, you know."

"There is no proof that you did anything then to rescue the man who was your friend and business partner," retorted Leighton. "This time failure might be fatal--for you."

The words and Leighton's manner had their effect. Shaking off his real, or assumed, apathy, Raoul faced his accuser angrily.

"I have given you the one clew of which I have any knowledge," he said, meeting Leighton for the first time eye to eye. "I have done what I could, I will still do what I can. But I won't act at the dictation of a man of whom I know nothing, whom I never even met until this moment."

"That's all very well," replied the other imperturbably. "But, as I said, I depend on you--quite naturally, it seems to me--to help in the recovery of your friend. My niece and I are in this country for the express purpose of solving David's former disappearance."

"Your niece?"

"Yes; the woman whom David expects to marry."

Raoul's defiant attitude vanished before this announcement. Irritation gave place to amazement, distrust turned to friendliness. Nor did he attempt to conceal his appetite for further news of David's personal affairs.

"David wrote me nothing of this," he said. "From his letter I learned that he was coming with friends. He did not tell me who these friends were."

"Well, there's every reason why I should be frank with you--as I expect you to be frank with me."

"You are still suspicious. What can I do, or say? I tell you, I don't know where David is."

"Do you know where he was when he disappeared from Bogota three years ago?"

"No."

"Strange! A man with all your interests at stake in this puzzle--surely you must have reached some conclusion?"

"I tell you, I have not," he replied sharply. "I know nothing, absolutely nothing."

"You admit you have a theory--let's call it that--a theory that fits the facts so far as you know them?"

"That's your deduction," sneered the other.

"But, I'm right?"

"Possibly," Raoul answered, turning again to the papers that littered his writing table.

"That's all I want," declared Leighton with satisfaction. "Now, we will plan our campaign."

Raoul, engrossed in a large, musty document which he had spread before him, greeted the proposal with a shrug of his shoulders. General Herran, impatient at the apparently futile and--to him--incomprehensible discussion, consumed innumerable cigarettes, while Leighton, with the air of one for whom waiting is an enjoyment, settled himself comfortably in a capacious rocking-chair.

The ensuing silence was rudely broken. There was a vigorous pounding upon the outer door, followed by the abrupt and noisy entrance into the house of some one from the street. Whoever it was, this late visitor stood little upon ceremony. But Leighton and General Herran had no difficulty in recognizing the nervous shuffle of feet along the stone corridor, the thump of the heavy walking-stick, accompanied by grunts of dissatisfaction and suppressed wrath. When Doctor Miranda finally bolted into the room, fanning himself as usual--although fans were a decidedly uncomfortable superfluity in the chilly night air of Bogota--they were, in a way, prepared for him.

"He is gone! He is lost--that leetle fellow! There is one more lost of them!" he shouted, repeating his disjointed English in staccato Spanish, as soon as he caught sight of his two friends.

Leighton and Herran exchanged amazed glances at this enigmatic bit of intelligence, while Raoul, preoccupied and restless though he was, could not restrain a grin at the unconventional being who had rolled his way, unannounced, into his house.

"What do you mean?" demanded Leighton.

"I tell you, he is lost, that leetle schoolmaster!" Miranda exploded.

"Andrew Parmelee lost? Impossible!"

"You are an estupido," retorted the Doctor angrily. "I say he is lost. Before my eyes he disappear. I never lie, I never mistake."

Not caring to discuss this announcement, Leighton tried to divert the torrent of words into something like a coherent statement. But in his present excitable mood Doctor Miranda floundered hopelessly in a morass of verbal difficulties and ended by telling his story in alternate layers of Spanish and English. From his account, however, his hearers were able to put together the main points of an occurrence that, vehemently vouched for though it was by the narrator, strained their credulity to the limit.

Early that morning, it appeared, Doctor Miranda, accompanied by the reluctant Andrew, had left Bogota for a visit to Lake Guatavita. The report that David's disappearance three years before had taken place there was given as the reason for the trip. Arrived at the lake, Andrew had declined to accompany the Doctor in his search among the cliffs that guarded the mysterious body of water, and had stationed himself near the cutting made centuries before by the Spaniards. This was a comparatively well sheltered spot and sufficiently removed from the precipitous shore which the cautious schoolmaster was anxious to avoid. His investigations concluded after the lapse of something like two hours, Miranda returned to the old Spanish cutting, expecting to rejoin Andrew. But Andrew was not there. Surprised at not finding him, the doctor at first supposed that the schoolmaster had grown tired of waiting and had journeyed back to Bogota alone. A single circumstance proved that in this he was wrong. There stood Andrew's horse where he had originally left him--and it seemed altogether unlikely that his rider had deliberately set out to cover the long and arduous miles to Bogota afoot.

"Another puzzle in psychology, I suppose," commented Leighton, with a sarcastic glance at Raoul Arthur.

The latter, however, in spite of the fact that Andrew was an utter stranger to him, appeared to be more amazed than the others by Miranda's story, and for the moment paid no heed to Leighton.

"When you found his horse you made a thorough search for your friend, of course, Senor?" he asked Miranda eagerly.

"Caramba! leetle fellow, what you think?" was the impatient reply. "I look, and I look, and I call--fifty times I call. If I can swim I jump into the lake to find him there. But I am too fat. So, I call more times, and I throw stones, and make the trumpet with the hands. It is no use. That leetle fellow say nothing. He is not there. So, I come away after long time."

"He is drowned, poor fellow," murmured Herran in Spanish.

"It is not possible," declared Miranda, turning angrily upon the general. "What make him drown? Of the water he is afraid. If he fall in--by mistake--he make a noise, he call to me. I am close by, I hear--I go to him quickly. But I hear nothing."

"Well, if he didn't drown, as our friend argues, what did become of him?" demanded Leighton.

"Ah, Senor," replied Miranda, his mobile features expressing hopeless bewilderment, "I do not know. It is just so as I tell you; he disappear, he vanish, he is gone. If I know where, I find him--I would not be here."

"So, there are two disappearances to account for," summed up Leighton. "Foreigners visiting Bogota seem to have the trick of vanishing. What do you make of it, Mr. Arthur?"

"I am as much at a loss as you."

"Hardly that, I should think. You, at least, know all about this mysterious lake. You know what happened there three years ago, for instance. And then you know----"

"You credit me with a great deal more knowledge than I can lay claim to," interrupted Raoul. "I never heard of this man who has been lost, as your excitable friend tells us, in such a singular manner--this Mr. Andrew----"

"Parmelee," supplied the other. "Andrew Parmelee, schoolmaster, of Rysdale, Connecticut. He is a very excellent person who, through his devotion to my niece and myself, has fallen, I fear, a victim to some strange plot. You will join us, I have no doubt, in his rescue. I am ignorant of the psychology of Guatavita. However, as I have already told you, I am here to add to my stock of psychological knowledge, and I fancy there are few who could teach me more, in cases of this kind, than you."

The sarcasm was not lost on Miranda, who shrugged his shoulders, muttered some unintelligible Spanish imprecation and exchanged a comprehending glance with General Herran. Raoul Arthur, on the other hand, ignored the tone Leighton had adopted in addressing him. In his reply he dropped the irritation and suspicion with which he had first regarded the old savant, and there was even cordiality in the manner and look accompanying his somewhat ceremonious acceptance of the task imposed upon him.

"If I thought it possible of so profound a scholar, Professor Leighton," he laughed, "I would say you were chaffing me. As it is, I feel the honor in your proposal that I should join you in solving these mysterious disappearances. Perhaps I can be of some help. At any rate, depend on me for whatever I can do."

"Two Americans unaccountably disappear in the heart of Colombia," mused Leighton. "If it were not for certain odd circumstances, I should say the country's indignation over the loss of Panama had something to do with it."

Against this suggestion Miranda impatiently protested.

"Impossible!" he shouted. "Always these people fight with the gun, the machete, if they are angry. They make much noise and talk; never they steal the enemies of their country and say nothing. It is one plot--and perhaps this senor will know," he concluded, darting an accusing glance at Raoul.

But Raoul, now thoroughly composed, smiled disdainfully, although agreeing in Doctor Miranda's rejection of Leighton's half-formed theory.

"If it is necessary," he assured them, "I can easily prove that I have had nothing to do with all this. I have not been out of Bogota for a month or more. Besides, I have the strongest business reasons for wanting the safe return of David Meudon to this country. As for Mr. Parmelee; I repeat--I never heard of him before. But, I agree with our friend here; the disappearance of these two men has nothing to do with the Panama trouble. It is something else. There is a mystery about it. I have no doubt it can be solved."

"You have the clew?" demanded Leighton.

"I didn't say that."

"Well?"

"Perhaps I know some one here--a woman--who could help us."

But that evening, after the departure of his visitors, Raoul Arthur found the little house in the Calle de las Flores tenantless, and learned that the woman, known to the neighborhood as La Reina de los Indios, had left Bogota, with all her household effects, a week before.

XI

IN WHICH ANDREW IS FOUND

Puzzled at not finding Sajipona, uncertain how to take up the promise he had given in regard to her, an altogether unexpected turn of events awaited Raoul at Leighton's hotel the next morning. Andrew Parmelee had been found. In the custody of two delighted police officers the missing schoolmaster, bewildered, quite speechless from his nocturnal experience, had made his appearance, scarcely an hour before Raoul's arrival. When, thanks to Miranda's persistent prodding, backed by the calm questioning of Leighton and Una's sympathetic ministrations, he found his tongue, the account Andrew gave of his adventure was so wildly improbable that his friends were inclined to believe he had been the victim of some temporary mental delusion. But this did not answer the threefold question: what had brought on his delusion, how had he escaped the vigilant Miranda, and how had he fallen into the hands of the police.

The two officers gave a simple statement of what, so far as they knew, had happened.

Late the night before, they said, Andrew had wandered into the alcalde's office in a little pueblo a few miles this side of Guatavita. His appearance, manner and mental condition--they hinted broadly enough that the luckless Andrew, when first found was in a very irresponsible condition indeed--called for the protection of the law. But as the poor gentleman, they said, was apparently suffering from nothing more than the effects of a too convivial outing in the country, he had been put in jail, not as a punishment, but rather as an act of humanity. Unable to express himself in Spanish, Andrew had evidently been something of a puzzle to the simple-minded officials of the pueblo. Out of his incoherent jumble of words, however, the name of a hotel in Bogota had been seized upon. A telephone message was sent to the municipal police, and the two officers who now had him in charge were detailed to conduct him in safety to his friends. Beyond this, the clearing up of the mystery of his temporary disappearance--if mystery it was--rested with Andrew himself. But he, for a time, was unable to satisfy the curiosity of his questioners.

"I don't understand it myself," he said hopelessly, addressing himself, in the main, to Leighton, whose calm demeanor was less confusing than the badgering of the excitable Doctor. "All I know is, that when Doctor Miranda went off to make some explorations on his own account, I felt a little nervous at finding myself alone in such a dismal place. Not frightened, you know, but just nervous."

"Why you not call to me?" demanded Miranda.

"There was really no reason to call for help, you see, as nothing had happened. So, just to pass the time until Doctor Miranda came back, I walked along the edge of the lake, feeling very miserable, I confess, wondering what had become of Mr. Meudon, and wishing that we were all out of this terrible country and back in Rysdale. At first, there was nothing to alarm me particularly; but the more I thought about the disappearance of Mr. Meudon the more nervous I became. And then, just as I was wondering if we would ever find him, and feeling more uneasy at the strange silence of that melancholy lake----"

"Caramba! You would have the lake to talk?"

"I--I heard footsteps among the rocks behind me."

"A sightseer from Bogota, I suppose," suggested Leighton.

"No, it was not exactly that--at least, I don't think so. But at first I really didn't turn around to see. I just kept on looking at the lake and going over some of the terrible stories I had heard about it."

"You see, this leetle fellow was quite mad with the fright," interjected Miranda. "He dream. He hear, he see nothing. Nobody was there. I know."

"I think, Sir, you are mistaken," protested the schoolmaster. "I admit I was nervous. But I was perfectly sane--and I was not asleep."

"Of course you were not asleep, Mr. Parmelee," said Una soothingly. "As for being nervous--any one would have been nervous."

"Well?" inquired Leighton impatiently.

"Well, Sir, as I was saying, I heard footsteps. They approached me. I made up my mind I had better see who it was. I turned around. And then I saw, a few yards from me, a stranger. How he came there without my having seen him before, I can't imagine. And then, thinking about this, I confess I became quite agitated."

"But what was he like, what did he say?" demanded Leighton. "It was a man, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes, I am quite sure he was a man--a very tall man, and singularly dressed."

"'Singularly dressed?'"

"I thought so, at least. But then, I am not familiar with the fashions of this country. You see, it is very cold on the shores of the lake, and I should think that any one going there would want at least to be warmly clad. But this man had nothing on that I could see, except a long sort of toga, just like the pictures I have studied in Herodotus. It was looped up on one shoulder through what looked like a golden ring----"

"He dream! He dream! this leetle fellow!" laughed Miranda. "He is too good."

"And this toga fell down to a point just below his knees. It was a purple and white toga--or perhaps I ought to call it a tunic--with a fringe of gold tassels. He had sandals on his bare feet and wore no trousers--at least, I could see none."

"Caramba!"

"Really, Mr. Parmelee, you describe a very singular sort of person for this age and climate," said Leighton coldly. "Are you sure that your agitated state of mind--you admit you were agitated--did not create a purely imaginary apparition?"

"Did I not say he dream?" demanded Miranda triumphantly. "And the police say he drink. But that is not so--he never drink. I know. I am there."

"I am very sorry, Sir; I know it sounds ridiculous," protested the distressed Andrew. "But I am certain that I was not asleep--or anything else that these well-meaning gentlemen say. I am only telling you what I really saw."

"Well, tell us the whole story. Setting aside this person's remarkable costume, what was he like, what did he say?"

"I don't think he said anything. He was an Indian. That is, he was not a white man. I never saw any one just like him, so I may not be right about the race to which he belongs."

Andrew's confused statement brought protests from Leighton as well as Miranda.

"In this country," remarked Leighton dogmatically, "a man is either an Indian, a white, or a half-breed. There are no negroes up here, you know. The negroes all stayed on the coast. As for your inability to tell us whether he spoke or not--well, the whole thing begins to sound absurd."

But the rebuke failed to bring out anything more clear in the way of explanation from Andrew.

"Pray, Sir, remember," he expostulated, "that at the time of this stranger's appearance evening was setting in. The growing darkness prevented anything like a reliable estimate that I could have made of his features. In the twilight he seemed dark to me, although not so dark as the average Indian. And yet, allowing for the twilight, he certainly was not a white man."

"But what happened?" urged Leighton.

"He appeared surprised at seeing me. And then he smiled, approached to where I was standing, and waved a sort of salutation to me. I think he may have muttered some words, either of invitation or friendly greeting. But if he did, it was not in English, nor in Spanish."

"He, at least, was not agitated, it seems! But as you were afflicted with more than the usual amount of timidity, I suppose you avoided him."

"I assure you, Sir, that as soon as I saw this person, I felt no further fear. There was nothing threatening in his manner. And it flashed through my mind that he could give me some information about Mr. Meudon. I observed that he beckoned me to him--and as he did so I followed."

"Well?"

"That was the singular part of it. There was every reason why I should not go with him--at least, not without first notifying Doctor Miranda. But this strange being smiled so pleasantly and seemed so friendly that my feeling of nervousness passed away, and I was eager to go with him. This I did. Apparently he retraced his steps, leading me along the shore of a little inlet to the lake until we reached a high wall of rock that I had not particularly noticed before. Here he stopped and looked at me, still smiling, as if to make sure that I was following him."

"Do you think you could identify this wall of rock if you were to see it again?" asked Raoul Arthur, speaking for the first time.

"I am sure I could," said Andrew, "because we stood in front of it for some time, this strange person in the toga passing his hand over its surface, while I wondered what he was going to do next. I noticed that it was a very high and blank wall indeed."

"Where was it?"

"Just next to the cutting that Doctor Miranda had told me was made by the Spaniards to drain the lake."

"I did not see this wall," expostulated Miranda. "You are in one dream."

"Never mind," snapped Leighton; "go on with your story."

"I am afraid you will believe me less than ever," said Andrew deprecatingly. "But I am only telling what I am certain I saw."

"Go on."

"As he passed his hand over the surface of the wall he gradually turned to one side until we stood before a narrow cleft in the rocks."

"It is not there," interrupted Miranda contemptuously. "I examine all this rock. It has no--what you call?--cleft."

"I am very sorry, Sir, but I know that there is such a cleft. I think that is what you would call it. You might easily have overlooked it, Sir. It was only a narrow opening in the rock, facing away from the lake and reaching up not more than about three feet from the ground."

"I remember it," declared Raoul.

"Pray go on with your story, Mr. Parmelee," Leighton commanded.

"There is not much more to tell, although the little that remains is quite the most extraordinary part of it. Pausing an instant before this opening in the rock, my strange guide crouched down until he was able to pass within it, beckoned me to follow him, and then disappeared."

The schoolmaster spoke with difficulty, hesitating every now and then for the word that would best express what had happened. Having plunged into his story, however, he went bravely on, gaining courage as he recalled his singular experiences, and impressing those who heard him with the sincerity, if not the truth, of the narrative. Of all his auditors Raoul, apparently, followed him with the closest attention. His attitude, indeed, seemed to indicate a belief, on his part, in Andrew's statements.