For a time the three there in the shadows listened spell-bound. The man’s words came forth in wild explosive outbursts. The people murmured assent, or sat in stolid silence, listening to the harangue.
“What does he say?” Curlie whispered.
“He,” Mona answered, “he say what is not true. But how are these simple ones to know? He say white men have come to enslave us, even as French men enslaved our grandfathers. Already we work roads we do not travel. Time will come when we work on plantations, in sugar mills, in mines and have no pay. That he says. Better he says that we die fighting.”
“People have worked the roads always,” said Dot. “Now they work on the most needed roads. It’s part of America’s efficiency.”
“I know,” said Mona. “But how can these understand? After the speech—the sacrifice.”
Curlie repeated, “We must get the goat. But how?”
He thought of his bow and arrow. He was a fair shot. The arrow point was sharp as a razor blade. One twang of the bow, one wild bleat, perhaps, and the goat would be no more. Yet he shrank from killing such a beautiful creature. Besides, such a course was fraught with danger. They might be caught. There must be another way.
And then like a flash, to his mind came a suggestion of a possible way out. At once he began groping about on the ground and about the bark of the ancient tree that spread its protecting branches above them. It was a pine.
“Listen!” said Mona. “He is telling them that a boat load of arms and ammunition awaits them in Deception Bay. After the sacrifice—the rebellion.”
“We must get their goat,” whispered Curlie. He was smearing his arrowhead with a sticky substance. “Now!” he breathed. “Now!” He nocked his arrow. Then, with a whispered word he thrust something into Dot’s hand.
“It’s a match,” his whisper was low. “A sulphur match. Strike it and apply it to the head of my arrow.”
A small blue flame appeared. It wavered for a second at the arrow’s head. A larger golden flame replaced it.
The next instant that yellow flame shot forward to lodge in the bark of the pine tree to which the goat was tied. It was a perfect shot. The flames of burning rosin were licking their way toward the rope that held the goat captive.
Mona stared with all her eyes. The tiny golden flame had not been noted by the throng. They were too intent on their leader’s words.
The arrow and the pine rosin flame burned fiercely now. The rope was already singed. In ten seconds it would be burned away. The goat’s keen senses warned him of fire. He strained at his rope. One second, two, three, five, then with a wildblaa—he threw his full force into one terrific tug. It was enough. The rope gave way. He fell. Rolling over and over, he at last scrambled to his feet and with a finalblaadashed away into the darkness that was the jungle.
For a space of ten seconds there was silence. Then pandemonium broke loose.
“The goat! The goat! The black goat!” the natives screamed in a chorus.
Then, with one accord, they went dashing away into the night, in a wild but futile attempt to recapture the goat.
“The goat,” said Dot, rising from among the ferns, “is free. And Mona,” she said quietly, “there was no spell woven about him. The moment his bonds were burned away he ran into the forest.”
“There was no spell,” said Mona.
“There will be no revolution now,” said Dot.
“Not at once,” said Mona. Then as if a new thought had come to her, “There is a great white shadow in the sea at Deception Bay. That is where the ship with rifles is hiding. They had better be careful. The great white shadow—he makes men disappear. They never come back.”
“That,” said Dot to Curlie in a tone so low the aged native woman could not hear, “is another of her wild Voodoo notions.”
They made their way unmolested down the mountainside. In time, after a long march, they entered the sleeping village. Once more, as Curlie’s eyes took in the beauty of it all, the few white chateaux, the many modest homes of the natives, he said with increasing conviction, “It must not be destroyed by a revolution. It must not!”
When they had entered the garden of the chateau, Dot put out a cool hand and gave Curlie a strong handclasp and a good night.
“Now,” she said, in a tone that was deeply serious. “We have had two adventures. Something tells me the third will come very soon. Where there are two there are always three. You will not forget?”
“I will not forget,” said Curlie.
“May you sleep well.”
“Sweet dreams.”
She was gone. The room that had been assigned to Curlie was on the ground floor. The door opened on the broad porch. He was free to come and go as he chose. Because the night had been an exciting one and his blood was not yet cooled for sleep, he decided to take a turn about the village streets. In this way he chanced upon a man who was destined to play a large part in the near future, not alone of himself but of his friend Johnny Thompson as well.
The man was standing before a low door over which a feeble kerosene lamp burned. Curlie recognized him at once. True he had never seen him, but he fitted so well the description of the short, broad man who had played the good Samaritan to Johnny when he fell among the wild natives on the road to the Citadel that there could be no mistaking his identity.
Strangely enough the man recognized Curlie Carson.
“You are one of the young men from up at the Citadel,” he said without waiting to be spoken to. “You are looking for the ‘Rope of Gold’. What strange fancy tells you it is there? And where is your companion?”
“I should like to know that last myself,” said Curlie.
“I thought you might,” said the short, broad man, blinking his eyes in a strange way. “Well, I can tell you this much: he left some native friends, left them flat when they were bent on doing him a good turn, a very good turn. Left them flat I tell you. Walked right out on them.”
Curlie was astonished at the man’s talk. How, he wondered, could the man know so much about Johnny?
“You know a great deal,” he said. “Perhaps you can tell me where he is now.”
“No,” said the man. “I can not. If he is lost, it is his own fault. The natives would have guided him safely back to the Citadel and perhaps he would have brought back with him that which he could not have carried, though I dare say he is a very strong boy.”
The man’s talk got Curlie in more and more of a tangle. He had assumed that Johnny had been kidnapped. But here was a man saying the natives were his friends bent on loading him down with presents he could not carry alone.
All this was too much for Curlie’s weary mind to grasp. In an effort to think it through, he looked down at his feet. When he looked up once more, the short, broad man was gone. He had vanished into the night.
As the three companions, Johnny, Doris and Nieta sat upon the mossy bank beneath the palms waiting for the dawn on that mysterious island. Johnny was not the only one to indulge in long, long thoughts. Doris came in for her full share.
“It’s strange,” she told herself, as a little thrill ran through her, “to be camping here on an island we have never seen. Who can say what wild creatures may roam these forests? Time was when whole herds of wild cattle wandered peacefully over our own dry plains or went charging madly up the steep slopes to escape some pursuer.”
As she sat there amid the silence, she fancied all manner of strange and unusual things, yet a stout heart held her nerves steady. Fortunately her mind was fresh. Sleep on the boat had done much for her. She was ready for another day and whatever it might bring. So she sat there listening to the voice of the jungle.
Night brings its changes to a tropical island. At night a thousand creatures, too torpid or too timid to face the light of day, fare forth in search of food. Strange mouselike rodents, and those resembling rabbits, sport in the spots where moonlight falls. The short-nosed wild pig comes forth from his dark retreat to root around among the ferns and shrubs. More fearsome creatures there are too: yellow snakes and great, brown lizards.
All this Doris knew, yet, strangely enough, she experienced no tremor of fear. Not so strange after all perhaps: for was not Johnny Thompson close at hand? It is strange this confidence of a girl in the strength of a boy; her utter confidence in his power to defend her from the beasts of the jungle, from a hidden enemy, yes, from the very lightning bolts that shoot from the sky.
Perhaps, as she sat there, eyes half closed, part asleep, part awake, the girl dreamed of the time when she should have a man who was all her own, and a home. For, long ago she had learned that the best of life’s good things come to those who have a roof, a kitchen, a hearthfire they can call their own.
She thought for the hundredth time of the jeweled monkey and of the treasure supposed to be hidden away in the now ruined castle. She thought of Johnny’s ‘Rope of Gold’ and wondered if it had really existed, existed still to-day or were made of the stuff that dreams are woven from.
She thrilled as she recalled Johnny’s story of the copper-colored natives and his battle with the wild boar.
Most of all she wondered about the island which they had reached in such a strange manner. Was it a small island? Was it large? Were there many natives? Were they wild natives? Was it true that some of these natives were cannibals? It had been true long ago in the days of Columbus. Had they changed or had they clung to their primitive customs down the long centuries? She thought of Nieta and her snake-tooth charm.
“If she who has lived among white people all her life still believes in this Voodoo charm,” she thought with a shudder, “what is one to expect from the inhabitants of some small island where the white man is seldom seen?”
So she wondered and thought, and wondered again until the first flush of dawn came sifting down among the trees. Then Johnny Thompson rose to shake himself and peer into the dawn. After that they started, the three of them, through that faint but beautiful light that is a tropical morning, toward the beach, fortified with brave hearts, strong bodies and clean minds against that which the day might bring forth.
* * * * * * * *
At that very hour Curlie and Dot were leaving the garden of the chateau. They were going in search of Doris and Nieta. Dot’s father was away. There remained at their home only two aged servants. Because of the threatened revolution it was necessary that the servants remain and keep a sharp watch out for trouble.
“Father should be told of the revolution,” said Dot. “He should know, too, that Doris has disappeared. But who will find him? He is to be gone for a week. He will travel from place to place and has no definite route.
“So,” she sighed. “I guess it’s up to us to do what is to be done.”
“Count on me,” said Curlie. “Mike and I will help you.”
“Mike?” The girl threw him a curious glance.
“Why yes,—Mike.” Curlie spoke slowly as if reluctant to say more.
With a girl’s quick perception, she read his thoughts and asked no other questions.
So in the half darkness of early morning, they left the beautiful chateau to lose themselves on the jungle trail that leads up to the ancient fortress where Dorn, after a restless night full of dire forebodings, was doing his bit helping old Pompee kindle a fire.
They walked along in silence, Curlie and the girl. Curlie was thinking. He had always thought of Haiti as a quiet place, sleepy and hot where nothing truly exciting ever happened, yet after being here only part of a very short summer, he found himself facing many mysteries and, as far as he could tell, in for more than one adventure.
“If only people wouldn’t be forever getting themselves lost,” he thought to himself.
His mind at that moment was busy with thoughts of his little laboratory at the ancient Citadel. “If only they’d leave me alone I’d get the thing completed. And it is important that I should complete it; especially if there is to be a revolution. With these superstitious natives——
“Man! Oh Man!” He unconsciously spoke out loud. “How they would run!”
“Who would run?” said Dot.
“The—why the natives, of course. They’re always running, aren’t they?”
Again the girl understood and said no more.
“She’s a peach of a girl. Don’t insist on prying into everything,” he thought. “Someday I’ll tell her my secrets.”
“If this Midas were only a dog,” he said a moment later, speaking of Dot’s donkey, “he could lead us back over the trail to his mistress. But being only a donkey—”
“Midas has donkey’s ears because he is a donkey.” The girl laughed a merry laugh. “Since he is a donkey you can’t expect too much of him. But we’ll find Doris all right.”
“I’m sure of it,” said Curlie.
* * * * * * * *
In the meantime Johnny, Doris and Nieta had reached the beach and were revelling in a tropical sunrise over the sea.
Dawn on a tropical sea! How can one describe it? Great, dark clouds that appear to threaten sudden disaster. The sea a sheet of gray steel. Then, slowly comes the change. The dull, threatening clouds are tinted with the pink of rose petals. The sea loses its dull foreboding and like the sky becomes a thing of beauty. Brighter colors follow, red, orange, yellow, and after that, with a low whisper of wavelets the day is ushered in.
And such a day as it promised to be for the three of them, Johnny, Doris and Nieta.
The first fact that Johnny’s practiced eye noted was that the boat that had carried them to these strange shores was gone.
“What if this should prove to be a small, abandoned island,” he said aloud, “like Robinson Crusoe’s?”
“What if it should?” Doris breathed.
What indeed? They were young, romantic. The sea lay before them. Behind them was the island. The thrilling possibilities of it all set their blood racing. Animal trails no human foot has trod. Jungles no man has explored. Strange butterflies and flowers of a species no man has known. Ruins perhaps of a long forgotten race or of some ancient pirate’s hiding place. All these possibilities and more lay before them.
There was food. Wild bananas, cocoanuts, bread fruit, fish in the streams and the sea, and birds so tame they might almost be caught with the naked hand.
As they stood there day-dreaming, the sea, the air, the very palm tops appeared to listen to their thoughts; so calm and still it was; such a Sabbath hush there was over all.
And then, crashing into their thoughts, wrecking the silence, came a laugh, the loud, prolonged laugh of a black man. There could be no mistaking it. No white man, certainly no Oriental, could laugh like that.
The boy and girl started, then stood for ten seconds looking into one another’s eyes. After that, because the laugh was contagious, they too burst forth into merry peals of laughter.
“There are people on the island,” said Johnny. “A man seldom laughs when he is alone. Never like that.”
“Johnny,” said Doris, “do cannibals and pirates laugh?”
“I doubt it,” said Johnny. “Surely not that way.”
“How strange it is,” he said after a moment of silence. “Men may read your character, your mood, your very attitude toward life and your fellow men by your laugh. A boy torments a smaller boy by burning his bare foot with a hot stick. He laughs. How different is that laugh from a heart so full of pure joy that it needs must overflow with laughter.”
“There are people over there,” he repeated. “There’s no use prolonging the suspense. Either they are friendly natives or vicious savages. In either case there is nothing gained by delay. Humanity is very much the same everywhere. We are usurpers in their land. The best we can do is to march right up and say, ‘Howdy’. Let’s go.”
And away they marched.
Of all the strange sights their heightened imaginations prepared them to behold, none, perhaps, could have so filled the minds of Doris and Johnny with astonishment as that which they saw when, having passed a grove of cocoanuts and a clump of low growing palms, they came to a broad clearing.
Before them was a circle of hard trodden sand. Standing there were more than a hundred natives.
In the center, and to all appearances king of them all, was a man seated upon a throne of hand-hewn mahogany. On the head of this man was a battered crown and in his hand an ebony stick, which one might assume was used as a scepter.
Most astonishing of all was the fact that the man was neither black nor brown, but white. And he was dressed in the olive drab uniform of an American Marine.
For one full moment they stood there, the boy and the two girls, unobserved, staring at this astounding revelation. Their reactions to the scene were strange. Johnny was scarcely able to resist a desire to laugh. Doris stood stock still, lips parted, pupils dilated, staring. Nieta felt an all but overpowering desire to turn and flee.
Then something happened. The strange king, on his stranger throne, turned his crowned head and looked squarely at them.
This apparently was his turn to stare and stare he did in quite an unroyal manner.
Another moment had elapsed by the time he regained his composure sufficiently to find his tongue.
“Why—why hello there!” he said. “Who are you and where did you come from?”
“Who—who are you?” It was Doris who asked this without answering his question.
“Can’t you see?” His face expanded into a broad grin. “I am the Marine King of Manowa. And these,” he added with a low bow, “are my subjects—some of ’em. Three thousand, in all, and pretty loyal, too.”
“This,” Doris told herself, rubbing a hand across her eyes, as if to dispel a vision, “is not reality. It is a chapter from Alice in Wonderland.”
But it was not. The Marine King of Manowa proved to be very real indeed. The repast he spread before his three young guests a half hour later dispelled the last doubt. One doesn’t get real oatmeal with rich cream, poached eggs and hot cakes with honey from the pages of a fairy book.
“Yes, he is real,” Doris whispered to Johnny. “But how strange.”
“I suppose you think it’s awfully queer,” said the Corporal King, polishing his battered crown thoughtfully, “that I should be king over here. Well, it’s a strange sort of a yarn.” He settled back in his rustic seat. “You see, this island is part of Haiti, and our country, the grand old United States of America, is engaged at present in an endeavor to bring order out of chaos.”
“Yes,” said Doris eagerly. “My uncle is a horticultural expert. He’s trying to help them to raise fruits and nuts in a better way.”
“That,” said the king, “is part of the work, a mighty important part, too. If you are to have schools, hospitals and all that, you must have money to support ’em. And rocks, big round silver washers I mean, comes from what you sell. But first of all,” he grinned a good-natured grin, “you’ve gotta sort of knock their thick heads together an’ git ’em to be good. And that’s no job fer a Y. M. C. A. secretary.”
“I’m a Marine, and Marines, so they say, are hard-boiled—tough as old sole leather baked in the sun. They put me here with twelve rough and readys and said, ‘Make ’em be good’. That was my job. I’d of liked somethin’ else but Marines have to take what they get—and be happy.
“Right off I discovered that there was two of these Christophes wantin’ to wear this brass ring on his old bean and neither one succeedin’ more than a day at a time.
“What did I do? What would you have done?” He turned to Johnny.
“Why I,—er,—”
“You’d a done what I done,” replied the king with a hoarse laugh. “You’d a said, ‘Here, gimme the thing. I’ll wear it.’ That’s what I done and it worked; worked mighty well.
“I’ve no great amount of education. Don’t take a college professor to see that. But I believe in it—education I mean. If I can get enough high hatters to teach ’em and enough money I’ll have the best educated little kingdom this side of the Golden Gates. We’ve no school at all yet. We’ll have one though. You’ll see.
“If this crown was set with diamonds,” he said, thumbing the spots where diamonds might once have been, “I’d take them out and sell them for money to buy a school house. For a school house is more important than diamonds or Persian rugs or anything like that.”
“I know where there is one diamond,” said Doris impulsively.
“So do I, several of them,” smiled the king. “Trouble is, folks won’t sell their diamonds to help me build my school.”
“But this one does not belong to anyone: at least a—a monkey has it and a monkey isn’t anyone, is he?” Doris blushed in her excitement.
“No,” said the king with a laugh. “Not that I know of.”
Then of course the story of the jeweled monkey had to be told.
When the story was finished the king sat for a long time in a brown study.
“Of course,” he exclaimed at last, “it sounds wild, but there are a great many stories—most of them wild tales I guess—about the treasure hidden by old Emperor Christophe before his reign was brought to a close.
“We know there was a heap of gold then and a barrel of jewels. What became of them? Who knows? What if this monkey has discovered the hidin’ place of that wealth? You might follow him—”
“And find all the hidden treasure,” Doris broke in excitedly.
“Exactly,” smiled the king. “But you’ll probably never see that monkey again. And yet, it’s strange what things happen. Take your landin’ on this island. You might have landed anywhere else and been lost from your family for days and days. But now, if you are brave enough, you’ll be at home in less than three hours.”
“Three! Three hours!” they cried excitedly.
“Less time perhaps. By airplane. My supply plane will be here within an hour. Then, if you’ve got the nerve, you can go flyin’ straight back to Cape Haitian. Do you dare?”
“Do we dare?” Doris leaped to her feet to do a wild fling across the sand. “Dare? Dare?” she cried again. “Who wouldn’t dare?”
As for the native girl, Nieta, she whispered to her snake-tooth charm, then said to Doris with a very sober face, “I am very much afraid, but I will go.”
Never, as long as she lives, will Doris forget that ride back to Cape Haitian. There was a friendly handclasp and a “May you come back” from the king and they were away.
Up, up, up they climbed. The sea swam beneath them. The little island of Manowa drifted away behind them. The great island of Haiti with its plains, its forests, its cloud-capped mountains reached out friendly hands to greet them.
“How wonderful are all the inventions of our age!” Doris thought. “What a marvelous privilege to live in such an age.”
Still, like some great bird their plane soared aloft.
Before they began this thrilling flight Doris and Nieta had told their pilot the exact location of their home in the village of Terre Plaisance. Cape Haitian, his own headquarters, was some twenty miles from their home. This distance they had expected to cover on donkeyback or on foot, as circumstance permitted. Imagine their surprise when, as they watched the ever changing panorama that passed beneath them, they began recognizing little hill peaks and dark groves that formed the surroundings of their own little village and not Cape Haitian at all.
“Surely,” Doris said to herself, with a little intake of breath, “he would not attempt to land in our garden, or the village street. That would be impossible.”
As for Nieta she was busy whispering to her snake-tooth charm, for she expected nothing else than that they would go crashing into some rocky hillside or plunging into the forest.
The plane circled once. It circled again, this time much lower. A third time they circled, so low that Doris could count the tiny flower beds in the garden. For a half minute she held her breath, then like some wild fowl that circling has failed to find water, the plane shot upward and away.
Curlie Carson and Dot heard the drumming of the plane and wondered at its presence there.
“I have never seen a plane here before,” said Dot.
“Perhaps,” said Curlie, “they have had some word of the revolution that is brewing and are on the lookout for the rebel camp.”
“I doubt it,” said Dot. “I—
“But look!” she broke short off to stand staring. “They’re coming down. They—they’ll crash!” She put both hands over her eyes to shut out the sight. But of this there was no need, for the plane disappeared silently behind the distant treetops.
“Come on!” said Curlie, seizing her by the hand and dragging her down the trail. “They can’t be far away. They may be injured—dying. The plane may be on fire.”
Then madly, recklessly, heedless of bruises and scratches, they went racing, scrambling, rolling, tumbling down the hillside.
“We—we must be half way there,” Curlie said, panting.
Again he paused to puff. “Can’t be far now.”
Imagine their surprise when, as they parted the branches of a low palm tree, they came upon an open, uncultivated field and saw in the midst of that field an airplane resting safely upon its landing wheels.
“Of all things!” said Dot.
“And there are girls,” said Curlie. “Two of them.”
“That,” said Dot, sitting down upon the ground with alarming suddenness, “is Doris and Nieta. Nice trick they played on us.”
“I’ve heard of them but never met them,” said Curlie, offering the girl his hand. “Suppose you take me over and give me an introduction.”
A half hour later, after many a laugh and much introducing and explaining, when the gallant young pilot had flown away the four young people, Doris, Dot, Johnny and Curlie, marched away toward the village of Terre Plaisance, which was now but a comfortable walking distance away.
* * * * * * * *
“Curlie,” said Johnny, late that night, as they sat with their feet on a broad window sill, looking through a great window to a scene of matchless beauty, tropical flowers, waving fronds and a sky sprinkled with stars, “Curlie, old boy, a fellow could almost settle down to something like this. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, have you?”
“No,” said Curlie, “I haven’t. I’ve been in the northern wilds. Too cold up there. I’ve seen the Amazon country. Too hot. Too humid. Too many bugs. But here—look out there. Sense it all, the night, the perfume of flowers, the stars.”
Perhaps they thought too of the girls who had left them but a short half hour before. Their dresses that night had formed a strange contrast to that worn in the bush. Khaki had been replaced by filmy things of brilliant color. Doris had been dressed in pink and old rose; Dot in dark blue and a glorious orange hue. Together they had played low, haunting native airs on banjo and ukulele, while the palms accompanied them with the ever restless rustle of the mysterious jungle.
“Yes,” said Curlie, “we could almost do it, but not quite. Only one thing keeps us from it.”
“What’s that?”
“The existence of a mystery yet unsolved.”
“Yes—many mysteries.”
“And so,” Curlie yawned, “we’d better turn in, for to-morrow is another day.”
Again it was night. Once more the moon edged the crest of the ancient Citadel with a line of silver. Curlie and Johnny had returned to camp. They were welcomed by Dorn with shouts of joy. Old Pompee had uttered grunts of satisfaction and had begun at once the beating up of sorghum seed into petit meal, which later would be formed into cakes and baked on hot coals.
The boys arrived too late for any daylight exploration of the Citadel. After an hour of rest followed by a sumptuous meal of hot cakes and roasted wild pig, they went each his own way in search of adventure.
Curlie struck away up the Citadel trail that led to his laboratory. There, finding all in order, he began work on wires, switches and batteries. From time to time a low tum—tum—tum came from one or the other of his two native drums. At other times there sounded a shrill piping not unlike the notes of a boy’s willow whistle.
Meanwhile Johnny was pursuing an investigation of his own. Recalling the story of the ancient black emperor’s visits to the Citadel and the story of how he went to the crest of the uncompleted fortress to work all night long with mortar and stone, he had thought too of the slaves who, looking up from their hard beds of trodden earth, had seen him working there. From all this he had developed a theory which he hoped might aid him in discovering the spot, or at least the general location on the wall where Christophe had worked at night.
“Here,” he told himself as he stood upon a certain raised portion of earth, “those slaves could not have slept. The space is too narrow and irregular. There were many hundreds of workmen. The greater part of them were slaves condemned to toil on the wall. They must be kept together, guarded against escape at night. Must have been a broad, clear, open space.”
After wandering about, flashing his light far and near, walking here, turning to the right, then to the left he came to a definite conclusion.
“This broad square,” he told himself, “must have been the sleeping ground of the workers. And from this point only a small section of the wall may be seen, not more than a fourth of it.”
Of a sudden, he started. It came to him with something of a shock that this very section of the wall might be seen plainly from their own camp. Dorn and Pompee had told him of the giant with fiery eyes who walked the wall at night, and the little man, the bearer of the telescope, who followed after, but he had quite frankly disbelieved their story. It was, he had said, but the work of their overwrought imagination. Now, as some slight confirmation of its plausibility came to him, he experienced an overpowering desire to go once more to the crest of the Citadel.
“This time,” he told himself, “I will avoid pitfalls.” For all that he found himself unable to suppress a shudder as his foot touched the first step of the stairway.
* * * * * * * *
During all this time Curlie was experiencing unsurmountable difficulties in his work as an inventive genius. The drums he had procured at some hazard did not fulfill his purpose. One, it was true, worked admirably. The other did not work at all.
“Of course,” he grumbled to himself, “one could use whistles, but drums would be more effective and dramatic.” The thought that in this land he might use the drums, which had played so great a part in the history of the country, to serve a new and strange end thrilled him to the very center of his being.
“Anyone knows that drums are of different tones, the same as bells and whistles,” he told himself. “And I’ll find the ones I want though they cost me thirty gourdes apiece.” The gourdes he spoke of were not the kind that grow on vines but Haitian silver coins worth twenty cents in American money.
Curious enough, just as he came to this conclusion there sounded on the still night air a faint, long drawn tum—tum—tum.
“They are calling. The drums are calling,” he muttered. “I must go. If it’s the right one I’ll pay forty gourdes—and be glad enough to make the bargain.”
* * * * * * * *
Curlie followed the sound of the drum. Not always did he find the right trail. At times as he skulked along beneath overhanging bushes the sound grew fainter. Then he must turn, retrace his steps to begin the search anew. In the main, however, his keen senses served him well.
Moment by moment, yard by yard, mile by mile the sound grew louder until at last the throbbing, pulsating air seemed full of it.
Curlie marveled at the boldness of the drummers. “They know that all the men of Terre Plaisance are gone,” he told himself. “It is well for them, else their drums would be split from end to end and they’d not get thirty gourdes for them, either.”
It was just at this juncture that a curious thing happened. As he moved stealthily forward, his keen ear caught a sound not made by a drummer.
“A belated dancer,” he thought. The fact that someone was so near him in the dark disturbed him.
For all this he continued gliding silently forward over the same trail. Eerie business this, following another in the dark. Snap! went a twig up there in the trail. Rustle, rustle sounded the swinging bushes. Now he fancied he heard a whispered conversation.
“Might drop off at the side of the trail and waylay me.” His blood ran cold as he seemed to feel the two-foot blade of a machete come down upon his back.
“Beat ’em to it,” he whispered to himself, drawing forth his flashlight. “One glimmer of light full in the face, then I do the vanishing act.”
A few gliding foot-steps, then from his lips there sounded a loud:
“Hist!”
The next instant the white gleam of his flashlight shot down the trail. It fell upon two startled faces, one white, one coal black.
But Curlie did not do the disappearing act into the brush. Instead he uttered a low exclamation that expressed profound surprise. The persons before him were Dot and her aged black servant Mona.
“Wha—what are you doing here?” Dot gasped, as he came forward.
“After a drum,” he stated briefly. “Buy that drum. Pay forty gourdes if I must. That’s the drum I want. Just the right tone.”
“Do you know what that drum may cost?” Dot’s tone was impressive.
“Fifty—”
“Not fifty, not a hundred, nor a thousand gourdes, but many times that in money and men. That is the war drum of the revolution. It says that they have the black goat once more. Come on. We are glad you are here. But we must hasten. Even now we may be too late.” The French girl’s dark eyes shone like fire as she turned once more to take up the trail to follow the sound of the drums.
The trail this time was short. To Curlie’s heightened imagination it seemed but a moment before he stood shoulder to shoulder with the dark-eyed French girl, staring at a scene such as no white person ever before witnessed.
“We are too late.” It seemed to Curlie that the girl said this, not with lips, but with heart beats.
That the words were true he did not doubt, for at that very moment the white blade of a long knife flashed. It entered the heart of the black goat. The creature quivered, then lay still, quite dead, while the red blood flowed free.
The scene they witnessed that night will remain with them long as life shall last. It was the blood covenant of the blacks and was for war.
It was over before their hearts had ceased their wild beating. Then, in dead silence, with not a drum beat, not a whisper, the natives filed away into the forest.
“We must follow,” said Dot. “For Haiti, and her kindly, innocent people, we must follow. The sacrifice has been made. But the torch of war must not be lit.”
“We must not follow.” The tone of Mona, the black woman, was firm. “If we follow we will be surprised and killed. There is another way. They go to Deception Bay where the ship is and where are many rifles and much ammunition. There is another trail. We will take it. It goes to the top of a very steep cliff. There we may look down upon them. After that we will think of a way.”
“She is right,” Curlie said to the girl. To the native woman he said, “Lead on. We will follow.”
After that, for a half hour they followed the black woman through such an intricate maze of rocks, cliffs, vines and bushes as neither of them had ever known before. Through it all the old black woman never faltered. In the end, after a final breathless climb of a hundred feet, they found themselves looking down upon a scene of matchless beauty. Riding high the moon painted on a glassy sea a path of gold. Rock-ribbed, a narrow bay lay before them. And close in, almost beneath them, lay a large, full-rigged schooner.
For a time they lay there side by side, the boy, the girl, and the aged black woman. Straining their eyes, listening with all their ears, they strove to learn all that they might of this little revolution that might grow into an affair of grave consequence.
To their waiting ears there came at last a series of low bumping sounds, as of someone moving heavy objects across a floor.
“They are shifting the cargo. Getting ready to unload, perhaps to-night,” Mona’s words came short and quick.
“But look!” said Dot a moment later. “A boat.”
“Rifles in cases,” said Mona.
“On such a moonlight night, would they dare?”
“It is a deserted spot. The goat has been sacrificed. The terrible work must be begun.”
“Then,” said Curlie, “we are too late.”
As the full meaning of all this came to Dot she felt herself stifled with emotion. Rifles and ammunition would be unloaded. Somewhere there would be an attack. Peaceful, happy people would be driven from their homes.
“Perhaps,” she told herself, “it will be our village. Perhaps our home, our most beautiful home where the pink roses bloom in the garden and the nightingale sings in the cool of the evening.”
The thing seemed impossible. The air about her was so still, the bay so placid. Haiti had been so peaceful. And yet the history of Haiti is a story of many revolutions.
“This little beginning may be part of a terrible affair,” she told herself. She recalled the stories she had read of those remote days when Napoleon tried with 20,000 picked soldiers to subdue these people and had failed.