n 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."

"What interest could she have had in reducing the man to this state of
dementia?"

"She had been like a mother to the young man, and had sheltered him in
her hut for years, when he had no other home. She was very much attached
to this adopted son of hers; she was longing to go back to her tribe and
die among her own people. It may be that she wished to take him with
her, and so gave him the drug that destroyed his will. Or, she may have
been the tool of others. All this is the merest conjecture. But the
facts remain that she foretold his fate, and that she vanished on the
same day on which he disappeared, and that he remained in exile,
voluntarily, until he was murdered by the Indians. Still--there might
have been another cause for this self-expatriation."

"May I inquire its nature?"

"No, duke; it is only in my secret thought. I have no just right to
speak of it to you. But if the question be not indiscreet, will you tell
me why you take so deep an interest in the unreliable story of this
Indian woman's life?"

"Certainly; because the wild young blade who married and left her, and
paid down his life for that desertion, was my own uncle, my father's
elder brother, Earl Netherby, the heir to the dukedom, by whose death my
father, and subsequently myself, succeeded to the title."

"You astonish me! Are you sure of this?"

"Reasonably sure. I was but five years old when my uncle came to bid us
good-by, before setting out for America. But I remember his having on
his finger a wonderful ring, a large solitaire diamond with certain
flaws in it; but these flaws were very curious; they were faint traces
left by the hand of nature shaping out a human eye. When ordinary
mortals like myself looked at the diamond, they saw the delicate outline
of an eye traced by the flaws in the stone; but it was said that
whenever a clairvoyant looked into it they could see, not the human eye,
but, as through a telescope, they could view the panorama of future
events."

"What non