To me
it was pathetic. I was sorry for him. He had been searching the world
for her. He loved this little golden-haired girl as he had never loved
me. But to me he came with his broken heart, and I"--her voice
trembled--"I took him back. He still cared for me, you understand. Ah!"
She laughed. "I am not a woman who is lightly forgotten. But the great
passion that burned in his Spanish soul was revenge.
"He was a broken man not only in mind, but in body. Let me tell you. In
that island which I have not named there is a horrible disease called
by the natives the Creeping Sickness. It is supposed to come from a
poisonous place named the Black Belt, and a part of this Black Belt is
near, too near, to the hacienda in which Juan sometimes lived."
Paul Harley started and glanced at me significantly.
"They think, those simple negroes, that it is witchcraft, Voodoo, the
work of the Obeah man. It is of two kinds, rapid and slow. Those who
suffer from the first kind just decline and decline and die in great
agony. Others recover, or seem to do so. It is, I suppose, a matter of
constitution. Juan had had this sickness and had recovered, or so the
doctors said, but, ah!"
She lay back, shaking her finger characteristically.
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