The vanishing of David Meudon in broad daylight while traveling on one of the main thoroughfares of the Republic became the sensation of the hour in Bogota. It excited more interest even than the return of General Herran and his party from Panama. The tale of David’s disappearance three years before was revived, and gossip found plenty of material from which to weave wild romance as to what had happened on both occasions. But you can’t build up a durable romance without some solid fact to base it on, and since this whole affair was wrapped in mystery, lacking anything tangible, public interest gradually and inevitably died out. Among government leaders, however, owing to the strained relations existing between the United States and Colombia, there was some anxiety over the incident.

General Herran, who was related to the President of the Republic, and who was proved to have had nothing to do—consciously, that is—with the loss of Panama, declared that the government was responsible for David’s disappearance. He argued that, as the country was not in a state of war, the marching of volunteer regiments on the public roads was a menace to foreigners having business in Colombia, and that therefore these regiments should either be disbanded or else ample protection be given to all travelers who might encounter them. As it was too late to look after David—so said the General—his friends, who were about to set out for Bogota, should at least be guarded from a like fate on the way thither. Accordingly, as this view of the case was approved, a company of soldiers was sent to Honda—and thus it happened that Doctor Miranda, Leighton and his niece, Mrs. Quayle and the schoolmaster—recovered from his fever and the Doctor’s pills—made the journey under military escort, arriving in the capital quite like official personages.

This novel manner of traveling, although it kept off vagrant militia, had its sinister features for the timid members of the party. Mrs. Quayle, whose fear of a burro grew in proportion as she became familiar with that harmless and necessary animal, believed that she and her friends had fallen captives, through a skillful bit of strategy, into the enemy’s hands and were being led either to their death or imprisonment. To this belief she stuck, in spite of the vehemence and ridicule with which Doctor Miranda seasoned his arguments against it. Indeed, had she dared express her full opinion her suspicions would have involved the Doctor himself, whose explosive habits and other eccentricities kept her in a continual state of alarm that was increased, every now and then, by his malicious allusions to the jewelry she wore. Andrew, inclined to attribute his fever to the famous pills and the heroic treatment to which he had been subjected, secretly shared her feeling, and was in hourly dread of some new calamity striking him from the same quarter. Harold Leighton and Una, however, were too much absorbed in David’s mysterious fate to be greatly concerned by what was going on immediately around them. The old savant, unable to explain the disaster, was distressed beyond measure by the poignant grief of his niece. In his own mind he was convinced that the singular occurrence on the Honda road was related in some way to David’s former disappearance, and this belief stimulated his professional eagerness to solve the puzzle presented by so strange a coincidence. Una’s appeal, therefore, to go any length in the rescue of David needed no urging. It was met with a hearty promise of aid from Doctor Miranda, who stormed at the government, in and out of season, for permitting bands of peons to endanger the lives of harmless travelers.

The Doctor was especially indignant with Herran, who called upon the Americans before they were fairly settled in their hotel in Bogota. He pitched into this hapless officer with his choicest bits of vituperation, until Herran began to think that the loss of one man, under certain circumstances, was as serious an affair as the loss of an isthmus. Leighton, however, did not share Doctor Miranda’s views of the matter.

“Miranda is unreasonable,” he said to Herran. “There is a mystery in this case. You have done all you could to save the young man, and you are now offering to help us.”

“That is right! That is right!” agreed Miranda. “We must find him.”

“Anything I can do——” volunteered Herran.

“Do you know an American in this town by the name of Raoul Arthur?” interrupted Leighton.

“How not! But—I don’t like him.”

“Never mind. I must see him. If any one can unravel this thing, he can.”

“Mr. Meudon spoke of him. I will find him for you.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“Surely, Senor. In the Calle Mercedes.”

“Take me to him.”

“Very well, Senor,” said Herran, apparently overcoming his reluctance; “that is settled. First, I will be sure he is there. Then, this night, I take you to his house.”

Una, hearing of this decision, doubted its wisdom. From the few references David had made to his partner in the Guatavita mining venture she had felt instinctively that Raoul was his enemy, an opinion strengthened by the psychometer test used at Stoneleigh. Leighton had agreed in this opinion, more or less; hence Una’s surprise that her uncle, who was usually overcautious, should now turn to Raoul for help.

“I believe the man knows where David is,” he declared.

“If he does, he will never tell you,” remonstrated Una.

“I am not so sure of that.”

“You may force him to do something fatal,” she urged.

“On the contrary! By going to him at once I will prevent any foul play—if there is to be any foul play.”

The possibility alarmed her. The suspense, the mystery surrounding David seemed more than she could bear. Bitterly she remembered Leighton’s attitude towards him in Rysdale. And now that their trip to Bogota, insisted on from the first by her uncle, had ended as it had, her faith in him was sadly shaken. She could not accept his judgment in a case about which he had already shown so grave a lack of foresight. Leighton, on his part, realized Una’s distrust of him. He did not try to dispel this feeling; but the knowledge that it was there spurred him on to do his best and with the least possible delay.

So, that very evening Leighton, piloted by Herran, sought Raoul Arthur’s abode on the Calle Mercedes. Like most Bogota houses of the humbler sort, this was a one-storied building, its heavy street door opening upon a wide brick corridor leading to a central patio from which the various rooms were reached. Following Colombian custom, the two men entered without announcement and made their way along the unlighted passage to the main living room, extending from the patio to the street. A lamp at the center of a long table heaped with books and papers distinguished this from the other rooms of the house, all of which were in darkness and apparently uninhabited. A man, somewhat past thirty, his hair slightly grizzled, his features pale and sharpened from study, sat at the table in this main room reading a much-worn leather-bound volume, the large black type and thick, yellowed paper of which gave ample proof of age. Aroused by the noise made by Leighton and Herran, he closed his book with a quick, nervous movement and turned to the doorway where his two visitors stood.

“This is Mr. Raoul Arthur?” asked Leighton grimly.

“Who are you?” demanded the other, his strange, shifting eyes on the massive figure before him.

“My name is Leighton. I am looking for David Meudon.”

“He is not here,” was the quick reply.

“I hardly expected to find him here,” retorted the savant.

“Then why ask me for him?”

“You were once, if you are not now, Meudon’s business partner. You must have heard of his disappearance. On his way from Honda to Bogota he—well, he simply vanished. That’s the only way to describe it. It all happened, no one knows how, a few days ago. The same thing took place some years ago when he was living here with you. You know all about the details of that first disappearance.”

“You are mistaken,” interrupted Raoul. “David Meudon left me for a number of months. On his return he failed—or didn’t think it worth while—to explain his absence.”

“That is all very well. Perhaps he could, perhaps he couldn’t explain it. At any rate, you thought that absence sufficiently peculiar to make it the subject of an article for the Psychological Journal.”

Raoul flinched perceptibly under this statement. His cool indifference took on the sort of cordiality that repels one more than open enmity. Bending over the table before which he was standing, he occupied himself in elaborately sorting and rearranging some papers at which he had been working.

“Of course,” he said, “I know you now! Mr. Harold Leighton. I didn’t place the name at first, which was altogether stupid of me. I have often wanted to meet you. As a matter of fact, I heard of your coming. It’s a rare treat in this out-of-the-way part of the world to run across a man who has advanced our knowledge of psychology as you have.”

The profuse compliment was not relished by the old savant. “I am not aware that I have advanced our knowledge of psychology, as you put it, one iota,” he said testily. “But I am here to add to the small stock of what I have already learned.”

“You must have found David a rare problem!” exclaimed Raoul.

“You know him, perhaps, better than I do.”

“Yes, I know him. That is, in a way. Engaging sort of chap. Clever, and all that. Mysterious, too, don’t you think? So, he has disappeared again, you say?”

“Don’t tell me that you have not known of it! The whole town has been talking about it.”

“Rumors, only rumors,” protested Raoul. “I would like to hear the real facts.”

“This gentleman, General Herran, with whom Mr. Meudon was traveling, can tell you the facts, such as they are. But I can’t see why you should need them.”

Raoul turned to Leighton’s companion, who had been trying to follow what the two men were saying. As they talked in English, a language of which he knew scarcely a word, he could make very little of it. Asked, in Spanish, to give the details of his ride with David, he made an excellent story of it, relating something of the discussion that had absorbed them while on the road together, the friendly feeling that had grown up between them, its touch of conviviality, and their abrupt separation in the midst of their encounter with the regiment of volunteers.

Raoul listened intently to Herran’s narrative, his glance roving restlessly from the narrator to his companion and back again, as if to compare the effect on both of what was said.

“It’s a strange tale, Senor,” he commented when Herran had come to the end. “These things with a touch of mystery in them are always fascinating—until you stumble on the clew. Then it’s very simple. I suppose you have no theory to explain our friend’s disappearance?”

“None, Senor.”

“You have just told me, Mr. Leighton,” he went on, addressing the latter, “that you are here to add to your knowledge of psychology.”

“I did.”

“Well, what do you make of it? Here’s what you are looking for—a neat psychological problem right to your hand.”

“I don’t see it,” said the savant impatiently.

“That’s always the way with you great scientists! But—it’s simple,” declared Raoul, a note of triumph in his voice; “absolutely simple—if you know David as well as I do.”

“I said that you probably know him better. I have not known him as long or as intimately as you have. But—again I fail to see what psychology has to do with it.”

“It has everything to do with it. David was not spirited away, as you seem to imagine. He disappeared of his own accord.”

“There is every reason to think the contrary,” said Leighton contemptuously.

“Oh, of course I may be wrong in my theory. But, as there is no other evidence, I see only one solution. It’s the clew we are after, you know—and the clew is right under your nose.”

“Perhaps you are on the wrong scent. Some investigators have a knack of being cocksure about everything. But—explain your meaning.”

“Very well. Let’s talk as one psychologist to another, then. Meudon has a peculiar temperament. You probably know that. But you may not know that the dual personality is highly developed in him. Under strong, sudden excitement this personality becomes greatly exaggerated.”

“He was laboring under no particular excitement at the time of his disappearance,” objected Leighton.

“What about the mission he was on? I have an idea that it was of absorbing importance to him. Remember, he was revisiting scenes connected with an episode that for some years he has been trying to forget but which he now wants to revive. And then, to cap the climax, suddenly he comes, slap bang, right into the midst of a rabble of peons who would be only too glad to kill him, or imprison him, or torture him—or anything else unpleasant. The same crowd tried to get me once, so I know what it all means.”

“All this is true; but the excitement was hardly enough to drown David’s normal personality.”

“It all helps, though. It predisposes things. It is, as I look at it, the final stage setting, with all the characters in their places awaiting the entrance of the villain to finish up the tragedy. And in this case the villain entered just at the critical moment. Mr. Leighton,” he asked abruptly, “have you ever known David to drink a glass of wine?”

“I can’t say that I have,” he answered doubtfully.

“Well, alcoholic stimulus, with certain temperaments—you know what it does. It starts up an altogether abnormal psychology, doesn’t it?”

“Very apt to.”

“Depends a little on the stage setting, doesn’t it? But, even without that it has its odd effects. On rare occasions, for instance, I have known Meudon to take a single drink of liquor. The result has been similar to that brought on by hypnotism.”

“Well?”

“There’s your clew!” Raoul announced triumphantly. “You have heard General Herran’s story. He tells us that just before they parted he and David drank several toasts together—and the toasts, I fancy, were stronger than mere wine.”

“You think, then——”

“Why, it’s childishly simple! David was knocked over by a force, an influence, to which he is unaccustomed. He is not at all a drinking man, you understand. Quite the reverse. With him the effect of drink would not be in the least like ordinary intoxication. From two former experiences I know that it would be far subtler. It would produce what you would call a pseudo-hypnosis, a condition of abnormal psychology.”

“Well?”

“Don’t you see what happened?”

“I have not had your experience with David,” was the sarcastic reply.

“It is not a question of mere personal experience,” said Raoul irritably; “it involves what we know—or guess—of the eccentricities of the human soul.”

“You are an enthusiast. Be more explicit. Don’t wander off in your statements.”

“Very well. I’ll put it in the lingo of science as nearly as I can. It appears to me, then, that David, by this little exchange of pistol shots, as you call them, with General Herran, brought into activity a portion of his brain that had not, for a number of years, intruded itself upon his conscious life. It had literally been sleeping all that time. On the last occasion when it was awake—when, in other words, he was under the sway of this subconscious ego—he was here, amid the very scenes in which he again finds himself. A moment ago you connected his first disappearance with the one which has just taken place on the road from Honda. Well, the General’s ‘pistol,’ as he calls it, suddenly threw David back into the memory of that first subconscious experience.”

“The Ghost of the Forgotten found at last,” mused Leighton, more to himself than to Raoul.

“Exactly! That’s a good way to put it.”

“Suppose your theory correct; what happened after David’s subconscious memory was awakened?”

“As a psychologist, you are better able to answer that than I.”

“I am not interested in abstruse problems just now. I am here simply to find David.”

“Difficult, perhaps. I couldn’t find him before. But at least I have given you the clew.”

“Your clew doesn’t explain. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“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.