I met Alexander and John Palmer a number of times after that, and gleaned from them what information I could. Suddenly Alexander disappeared, but no one thought anything of that. He likes to make his movements as mysterious as possible.
I next hunted up Arthur McManus, or rather my sister-in-law hunted him for me. He is second in importance in the circle, but he certainly is the worst rogue I ever met. He is a mulatto, and terribly crippled. He looks as if he had a bad case of rheumatism, but he says he was conjured by Mandy Jones, another member of the circle, before he turned witcher-man. He told me very nearly the same things the others had, and added that if I wished to turn a trick back on the one who set it for me, I must find it and throw it in running water.
He said that if you wish to drive your enemy mad, it is better to get one of his hairs and slip it inside a slit in the bark of a tree. When the bark grows over the hair, the enemy's intellect is gone for ever. "That", said he, "is better than sticking thorns into images."
Another use he had for hair was to have it summon people. "If you take several hairs from your head, name them for the person you wish to see, place them in a bottle of rainwater, and set them near the front door of your house; the person named will start for that spot as soon as the hairs swell and turn to snakes, which will be between the second and fourth day. For nothing can withstand the power of snakes."
Arthur it was who explained about the "Goat without horns". He knew it was offered up in the "outlandish country", and "way down south", but had never seen it done. He said the offering of a child or a kid without horns was "to seem to be something it stood for". When I could not understand, he illustrated with a story.
Before the civil war, when he was still a slave, he saw the real "Goat without horns". It was one night down in Arkansas. He was a field hand, and lived in a cabin, but his sweetheart, Mary Jane, lived in the big house (the planter's house) as chambermaid. On the night in question, he, with his sweetheart and her mother, Aunt Melissa, the cook, concluded to go a few miles down the road to do some trading with an old man who kept a little store, and often bought stolen goods from the negroes in the vicinity.
