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 Mexica