So it was not because he wanted to test the colonel’s feelings that Chip went over to Gunn’s house that afternoon; he wanted to see Rose Maitland. The last time he had seen her she was bewildered and hysterical.
That had passed off entirely; she came in to meet him bright-eyed and smiling. Yet Chip thought she looked pale, and that her smile hid a feeling of anxiety. She soon admitted that she stood in deathly fear of the Hindu, who was still the man of mystery to Chip.
“I was feeling so safe, you know,” she said in her frank way; “the constable had given Colonel Gunn such assurances. I had been going about with confidence. So I thought I needed no one to guard me while I went out on the ice a little while. And down there everything was so quiet and peaceful that I really went farther than I meant to go; I skated on and on until I was down by the boathouse. I supposed the place was unoccupied.”
“We’ve stored our ice yacht and snowshoes and skis and things like that in it,” said Chip.
“But no one has been staying there regularly?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought. Yet the Fardale students go in and out of there, as I knew. So when I heard some one call to me from the boathouse I thought at first it was you, and then thought it must be Kadir Dhin; and, as I didn’t understand just what was said, but got the impression that you—I mean Kadir Dhin—was hurt and needed help, I ran up to the door on my skates.
“I knew that it wasn’t you—I mean Kadir Dhin—when it was too late; I was blinded by a cloth that struck me in the face as I opened the door; it fell over my head as if it would smother me; and it was filled with the odor of a powerful drug. While I fought to get my head out of the cloth, the drug overcame me.”
She was trembling; the color had left her cheeks.
“Before I became so dizzy and bewildered,” she added. “I heard the man speak, and I recognized his voice as that of Gunga Singh, the Hindu soldier who murdered my father. The odor of the drug I had encountered before, in India. A man was once murdered there, and that drug was used; I was with father when he made an investigation of the murder.”