“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.”