THE GIANT ON THE WALL
All that long, tropical day, with the sun burning hot and dry upon him,
Curlie Carson had sought for some trace of Johnny Thompson. At the time
Pompee discovered the break in the top of the fortress he was some
distance away from the Citadel.
Toward evening he had disappeared into the brush. There, crouching low,
like some great, slim cat he prowled along bush grown, vine hung trails
looking for a familiar footprint.
Long after darkness had fallen, with the golden spot of an electric torch
ever moving before him, he prowled on.
Here a surprised covey of wild parrots flew screaming away, and there
some strange creature went scampering down his path. Here he narrowly
avoided stepping on a great lizard asleep in the trail, and there a
yellow snake with green eyes that gleamed horribly in the night caused
him to start and shudder.
At last, at a place some five miles from the Citadel, where two trails
crossed at a sharp angle, he came to an abrupt halt to bend down and
examine the loose, dry soil. Dropping on hands and knees he followed the
other trail for a distance of fifty yards or more. Coming upon the dry
bed of a stream, he halted. There, to all appearance, he found what he
sought.
The bed of the stream was completely dry, but up the bank a little way
was a small damp spot, where in the rainy season a spring flowed. In this
damp spot were three well marked footsteps.
"Huh!" he grunted. "Didn't think he'd desert us."
For a full moment he stood there pondering. Then at last he turned and
walked back toward camp.
"He wouldn't desert us. Stands to reason he wouldn't," he muttered. "He
might have discovered a clue. Some native might be leading him on. But
leading him on to what?"
Curlie didn't trust natives. He had a notion that all people save those
of his own race were treacherous.
Arrived at camp, he cast down a bombshell by saying in his quietest
drawl:
"Johnny's gone into the mountains with a bunch of natives. We'll follow
in the morning, and we'll take Mike with us."
Dorn, the French boy, wanted to ask who Mike was, but being timid, and
having always been somewhat ill at ease in the presence of this peculiar
boy, he asked nothing.
Curlie ate hastily and in silence. Then with a mumbled excuse, he lost
himself once more in the night.
"Strange fellow," said Dorn.
"Some day mebby _Papa Lou_," said old Pompee, with a shake of his wise
old head. "Plenty understand that one boy."
A _Papa Lou_ is a native witch doctor of Haiti, a priest of the Voodoo
cult. Dorn thought it very improbable that Curlie, or, for that matter,
any white boy, would turn into a _Papa Lou_. However, realizing the
futility of arguing with an old man, he kept silent.
With his back against a tree, with the moon gilding the topmost ridge of
the ancient fortress, the French boy sat wondering in a troubled sort of
way what had become of his good friend Johnny Thompson. Beyond the
discovery of the khaki handkerchief at the bottom of the pitfall, they
had found no trace of him.
"He can't have gone away of his own accord," he assured himself. "He is
too honorable for that. He--"
His reflections were broken short off by the cry of old Pompee:
"See, _Monsieur_. Only look! Look!"
Dorn did look and what he saw made his blood run cold.
* * * * * * * *
What Dorn saw had nothing to do with Johnny Thompson. For all that Johnny
was having his share of adventure. We left him, as you will know, hiding
away with his captors in a secluded tropical glade. The day was hot. He
had traveled far. His day dreams may have blended with real dreams. Be
that as it may, he was suddenly startled into complete consciousness by a
series of shrill cries and, as he sprang to his feet, found himself in
complete possession of the field. Every black had fled.
Hearing a sound in a tree at his left, he turned to see a native
frantically struggling up the trunk in an endeavor to reach the lowest
branch.
"The whole bunch has gone mad," he told himself.
Then, of a sudden his eyes fell upon his quiver of arrows lying on the
ground. With an instinct of preservation harking back perhaps to those
remote days when his ancestors dressed in skins and lived by hunting with
the longbow, he reached first for his quiver, then his bow.
As he reached for the bow, he caught sight of a pair of brown heels
speeding down the trail.
Instinctively he turned to look in the opposite direction. That instant
his blood froze.
Charging straight at him was a creature terrible to look upon. Curling
yellow tusks six inches long, jaws that chopped at every bouncing step, a
wild boar of the wilderness, savage, mad with rage, red-eyed and
terrible, had come tearing out of the jungle.
One instant Johnny stood there paralyzed, the next, with such automatic
precision as only comes from endless hours of training, his splendid
hands did his bidding.
An arrow flashed into place, the bow string sang taut, the arrow sped to
strike with a dull spat. The mad beast turning half about uttered a low
grunting roar. The second arrow sped. The wild boar, rearing high and
lunging far, fell at the boy's feet, dead.
For a moment Johnny stood there motionless. The whole affair had been
thrust upon him so suddenly that he had been able to form no plan of
action, nor indeed to comprehend the meaning of it all.
"No rifles," he told himself at last, thinking of the natives.
Of a sudden it came to him that he was master of the situation. More than
one pair of eyes had witnessed the deadly execution of his powerful yew
bow. Eight arrows remained in his quiver.
"Not one of those natives, nor all of them together would dare oppose me
so long as I have my bow and arrows," he told himself.
As proof of this he saw a man in the tree nearest him, a look of abject
terror on his face, staring down at him.
Seeing the wild creature lying before him and knowing the high place
which wild pork held in the esteem of the natives, he drew his clasp
knife to cut the jugular vein and allow the blood to run free.
Then with a laugh, he tossed his quiver of arrows over his shoulder,
gripped his bow and turning walked slowly back down the trail that had
led him to that place.
* * * * * * * *
When Dorn was brought to full consciousness by Pompee's grip on his arm
and his insistent, "Look, _Monsieur_. Only look!" he stared wildly about
him for a moment. Then, following the direction of the aged native's
uplifted and pointing hand, he strained his eyes in an attempt to
discover some unusual sight at the crest of the ancient Citadel.
For some little time he saw nothing. The distant tum-tum-tum of a native
drum smote his ears. That was all.
"The natives," he said in a surprised whisper. "Why are they here?"
"It is not the natives of to-day." Pompee's voice seemed to come from the
depths of some echoing chamber. "It is a spirit of the past. It is he,
the Emperor, Christophe. I have heard. I did not believe. Now I see. I
believe. It is he who beats the drum. It is he who walks upon the wall.
He has come back to call his scattered people together. For what? Who can
say?"
The old man was trembling from head to foot, whether from excitement or
fear the boy could not tell.
Just as he finished Dorn's eyes caught the gleam of two red balls of
light. These appeared to be some eight or ten feet above the top of the
Citadel.
"And they move!" he said in a tense whisper. "They move!"
"_Oui Monsieur_, they move," said Pompee. "It is he. It is Christophe,
the great man of Haiti. He has come back to walk the walls of his great
work, his Citadel, just as he worked there a hundred years ago with
trowel and mortar."
Dorn was silent. This thing was weird in the extreme. He did not wish to
believe in spirits. Yet the night, the silent jungle, the deep shadows of
the fortress so grim and old, the memory of the bloody deeds that
fortress had witnessed worked powerfully upon him.
Then as he sat there, hands gripped tight, tense, silent, expectant, he
saw the thing clearly. A figure, a very giant of a man, (or was it a
man?) moved forward at the top of the Citadel. The moon had climbed to a
point where it appeared as a yellow ball lying on the very crest of the
fortress. And now the giant figure, moving forward, stood out in bold
relief against the ball of gold.
"It is Christophe," the aged native murmured. Dorn could hear his teeth
chatter. He was swaying back and forth with a rhythmic motion that
appeared to accompany the distant beating of the drum.
"And there, there," again Pompee gripped his arm, as the giant figure
passed on, and a shorter one moved into the spotlight that was the full
moon.
"There is the bearer of the magic telescope. He was ever with him."
It was true. A short figure followed the giant as he walked on the wall.
A moment longer they watched the strange, shadowy pair. Then a cloud,
drifting in from the sea, hid the face of the moon and all was shrouded
in darkness.
At that precise moment the drum beats ceased. Silence and darkness hung
about them like a shroud.
"He is gone," said Pompee. His tone was deep. "He will return. It is a
sign."
"A sign of what?" Dorn asked.
"How should I know? I am but a poor old man. I am not a _Papa Lou_."
For some time they sat there in silence. Then Dorn said in a quiet tone:
"Pompee, tell me of the Magic Telescope."
"There is much to tell, my son." Pompee's tone too was quiet now. "But I
will tell you a little. When the great Christophe came to be our ruler,
men were in the habit of sleeping much in the sun. The fields were
neglected. Weeds and jungle were everywhere and people were very poor.
"Christophe was a great worker. He was not always a tyrant. In the
beginning he loved his people and dreamed great dreams for them. It was
only when the love of power and gold had driven out his love of God and
the toiling people that he became a tyrant.
"At once, when he became emperor, he decreed that all men should work
certain hours every day, except on holidays and Sundays. That this decree
might surely be put into execution he bought himself a great, brass
telescope. This, a brown boy from the hills always carried after the
emperor. Many days the emperor wandered far over the hills and the
mountains. Always the boy and the telescope went with him.
"On some tall pile of rocks the emperor would stand for hours, looking,
looking everywhere. It has always been said that the telescope had magic
within it; that with it the great man could see hundreds of miles. I do
not know. Certain it was that many times a man sleeping in the shade
during working hours one day found himself in a dungeon or on a chain
gang the next. Christophe had seen him from afar."
"And the telescope?" said Dorn eagerly. "Where is it now?"
"Who knows, _Monsieur_? Who can say? That was all very long ago. Where
too is the 'Rope of Gold'?"
"Yes, where?" Dorn echoed.
"But see, _Monsieur_. It is time we sleep."
Dorn rolled up in his blankets. But sleep did not come at once. Half an
hour later Curlie Carson came creeping back to camp and found him still
wide awake.
"Dorn," Curlie said in a low whisper, "did you see anything to-night?"
"I saw something that was very strange." Dorn replied.
"Dorn," said Curlie, "some wise man has written, 'Believe nothing you
hear and only half that you see.' That which you have seen to-night
belongs to the half which is not to be believed."
Dorn had only the remotest notion of the meaning of these strange words.
Yet they brought him a curious sort of comfort.