By the light of his lamp, consulting a small manuscript chart of the ruin, Manuel passed through many tortuous passages and dark chambers until he came to a ruined wall. Climbing a few feet up the crumbling stones, he set his eye to a crevice, nodded as though satisfied, wrenched away several more stones, laying these down silently and beckoned Stuart to come beside him.
The boy looked down on a circular hall, the outer arc of which was pierced with ruined windows opening to the sky.
"Leborge will sit there!" whispered Manuel, pointing. "Kill him, and you will be rich!"
Stuart nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.
Walking as silently as he could, Manuel left the place, pondering in his own mind what he was going to do with the boy. Should he reveal the secret and have his fellow-conspirators kill him? Should he turn him over to the machetes of the negroes? Or should he kill the boy, himself? One thing he had determined—that Stuart should not reach the plains below, alive.
And Stuart, in that hole of the ruined wall, crouched and watched. Of what was to happen in that room below, what dark plot he was to hear, he had no knowledge. Yet, over his eager desire to find out this conspiracy against the United States, above his anxiety with regard to the fate of his father, one question loomed in ever larger and blacker proportions—
He had got into the Citadel. How was he to get out?