The Rope of Gold / A Mystery Story for Boys

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Rope of Gold, by Roy J. Snell
E-text prepared by Stephen Hutcheson, Rod Crawford, Dave Morgan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
A Mystery Story for Boys
By ROY J. SNELL
The Reilly & Lee Co. Chicago New York
Printed in the United States of America
Copyright, 1929 by The Reilly & Lee Co. All Rights Reserved
Night was settling down over the mountain side. Already the valleys far below were lost in darkness. The massive fortress which the dwellers on the island of Haiti have always called the Citadel hung like a mountain cliff above a boy who, hot from climbing, had thrown himself on a bed of moss at the foot of a gnarled mahogany tree.
“Whew!” he exclaimed softly to himself. “Even three thousand feet above the sea here in Haiti it’s hot. Hot and dry. Fellow’d think—”
He broke short off to stare. A curious thing was happening. Out from a small dark opening some forty feet up the perpendicular wall of the massive abandoned fortification, something quite indistinct in the twilight had moved and was creeping slowly down the moss-grown wall.
“Like a snake,” he told himself, “only, here in Haiti, there are no snakes to speak of and certainly not one as long as that. Only look! It’s down to the window below; a full twenty feet.
“That window—” He caught his breath, then began to count. “One, two, three, four,—