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.