"On the afternoon before that cold 'Norther' we had about a month ago, Nita was sitting, as she often did, by the magnolia spring. You must remember the place, colonel. There she received a most unexpected visit from her brother Louis, whom she had not seen for years. He had been sent by Coacoochee to carry the news of the battle of Okeechobee to the northern bands, and also to bring a message to Nita. After they had talked for awhile, he had to go on his way, but promised to be back in two days' time and take any message or token she might wish to send to her lover."
"That's who it was then!" broke in Ralph Boyd. "Well, I am glad to have that part of the mystery cleared up."
"Yes," continued Anstice; "and of course, Nita was awfully excited. When the second day came, she spent nearly the whole of it at the spring. Finally, late in the afternoon, as before, she heard a voice calling to her by name, very softly. Thinking, of course, that it was Louis, who feared, for some reason, to advance into the open, she followed the direction of the voice unhesitatingly. Then the first thing she knew, a cloth was flung over her head, she was seized in a pair of strong arms, and borne struggling away.
"When, to save her from suffocating, the cloth was removed, she found herself in a boat, with two white men and her brother Louis. The poor fellow's head was cut and bleeding, as though from a cruel blow, and he lay bound in the bottom of the boat. One of the white men was rowing, and the other sat watching them, with a pistol in his hand."
"Did she recognize the white men?" inquired Ralph Boyd.
"Yes, she says they were the very two who stole her mother, and afterwards stole the wife of Osceola."
"The scoundrels!" cried Colonel Worth. "In that case they were the prime instigators of this war, and ought to have been hanged long ago."
"Yes," answered Boyd, "and one of them stole my sister, colonel, and turned her adrift in the forest, where but for Coacoochee she must have perished. The same gentleman also shot me in the back at the battle of Withlacoochee, and supposed he had killed me."
"Hanging would be altogether too good for the brute," declared the colonel, excitedly. "He deserves to be burned at the stake."
"That is what the Indians thought," replied Boyd, significantly. "But go on, sister. Did Nita find out the name of the other man?"