wonder—”

He broke short off. A dark figure had appeared at the upper opening from which the rope ladder dangled.

One breathless moment, as if looking for some movement far or near, listening for a sound, the figure of a native huddled there on the giant window ledge.

It was strange, Johnny thought. Crouching there in the shadow, one hand on the muzzle of a century old brass cannon that had once barked its defiance to the world, this native seemed a spirit come from out the past.

“He’s not that,” the boy told himself. “But who is he? When did he come?”

They had been at the ancient fortress. He and Curlie Carson had been prowling about its dungeons and secret passages for four days and had not so much as seen a sign of a living human being. The silence they had found oppressive by day and spooky by night.

“And here is a man. I wonder—” His wonderings came to a sudden end. A strange phenomena had broken in upon them. Just as the native, having cast fears aside, had swung out upon the slender rope ladder, one of those curious after-glows of a sunset drenched the Citadel with golden light.

The effect was magical. “As if it came from Arabian Nights,” Johnny told himself, thrilled to the very center of his being. The figure of the native, quite naked save for a loin cloth, was transformed into a bronze statue.

“And the ladder seems our ‘Rope of Gold’,” Johnny breathed.

The after-glow endured through a space of ten seconds. Then all was dark as before. It lasted long enough for the boy to see that a machete, a great, long-bladed knife, hung at the native’s side.

“And Curlie is alone, unsuspecting,” he told himself, and a chill ran up his spine.

At once his mind was in a whirl. Should he shout, warning his pal and perhaps frightening the native away?

This, he thought, might be wise. Yet, nothing serious might be contemplated. Most natives wore machetes at their sides. Besides, there was his own bow and arrow, a very useful weapon. An arrow shattered against the wall would serve to drive the intruder away.

“And if worst comes to worst—”

He gripped his bow, nocked an arrow, then sat there breathless, waiting.

The thing that happened in the next sixty seconds was surprising and dramatic.

With astonishing speed the native glided down the ladder.

“He’s there! He—he’s looking in.”

Gripping his bow hard, Johnny took a long breath. He felt that the time had come for sending the arrow of warning. And yet—he wanted to know more. So he waited. The bronze figure, faintly illumined by the pale light from within, hung there for a few moments, motionless.

Then with the speed of thought, things happened. From within there came a sudden flash of blinding red light. The next instant the wall was a blank of darkness.

The whole thing was over in a space of time not measured by seconds, yet Johnny had seen it all. The native, his eyes distorted by fright, had leaped backward and down. Turning a complete somersault, he had gone speeding to earth, twenty feet below.

“He’ll be killed!” Johnny exclaimed aloud.

But no. The space at the foot of the wall was clear of brush. The next moment he saw the man plainly. He went skulking along the wall to at last lose himself in the shadows of some ancient palm trees.

“We’ve seen the last of him,” Johnny told himself as he rose to take a long breath. “I must be getting back to camp. Dorn and old Pompee will think something has happened to me.”

As he made his way rapidly over a narrow path, down a slope and up the other side, then through a dark and tangled forest, his thoughts were busy.

“Big piece of nonsense, this search for the ‘Rope of Gold’,” he told himself. “May never have existed. Anyway, we’ll never find it. Fascinating though, and lots of fun, this search; and life can’t be all work.”

They had worked, he and Curlie Carson. For two months, under the Professor’s direction, they had taught native children the simplest rudiments of learning, had assisted native planters at their work and had taught them new methods of tilling the soil.

It had been a short summer and now, only a few days more and he, Johnny, hoped to be going back to the States. And Curlie Carson, the strange lad with the wanderlust and a bent for inventions, would go elsewhere too.

They had heard many times of the ‘Rope of Gold’; a very fancy rope it had been, hand-wrought with flowers of white gold and leaves of green gold woven through it, so the story ran.

When the native emperor, the magnificent Christophe, was at the height of his power, this rope of gold had been strung through loops of silver all the way down the sides of the massive steps that led up to his palace. A hundred feet long it was. When rolled up it required two men to carry it. When revolution threatened, so the story ran, the emperor had hidden the rope away in the Citadel and there it remained to this day. But where?

This was the question the two boys had tried to solve. Thus far they had made no headway. The ancient walls, the dungeons, and secret passages had yielded nothing more valuable than dust, bats, rats and general decay.

“It’s something one’s not likely soon to forget,” the boy told himself.

He fell to musing on the life of that native emperor and the fortification he had built.

“He thought the French would come back,” the Professor had said to him one day. “He had great dreams for the progress of his people. You can hardly blame him for wanting to defend them. In the end he forgot his great dreams for his people and began worshipping gold and that immense pile of brick and stone. Had he put his trust in God instead of in power and gold,” the kindly old professor had rumbled on, “had he written his name on the hearts of men, his name would have lived forever. Now there is only that crumbling pile of masonry to remind the world that he lived at all.”

“It’s all very strange,” Johnny thought. “If one could but have lived then. If he—”

He stopped short in his tracks. His eye had caught sight of something unusual, a white thing hanging from the lower branch of a large tree.

“Couldn’t have been here when I came along an hour ago.” His curiosity increased. “I’d have noticed it.”

He took two steps forward, then put out a hand to touch it. The thing gave forth a hollow sound.

“How queer!” he thought. “A native drum, hanging here.”

Without thinking much about what he was doing, he took down the drum, which was a three foot section of a hollowed-out log with a goat skin strung across one end, placed it between his knees and gave it two quick, sharp blows with his hand.

The result was two resounding roars that set the hills echoing.

The next instant, quite without warning, the boy was seized and thrown violently to the ground.

CHAPTER II
THE NATIVE DRUM

Johnny Thompson was no weakling. He was a football player and a lightweight boxer of no mean ability. He had lived clean and taken good care of the physical side of his being as every boy should. When the unseen person seized him so suddenly from behind he was down but not out by any manner of means. With a deft twist he freed himself from the grasp of his unknown adversary, and, leaping to his feet, struck out with his right and left with the best of results. His clenched fists landed with dull thwacks. There