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.