“Back track is better,” he told himself. “May find some trace of Johnny. At any rate it will lead me back to the Citadel, to camp and my laboratory.”
He wondered in a vague sort of way what Dorn and old Pompee would think of his prolonged absence. Would they start out in search of him? He hoped not. Yet one never could tell. He had been gone since early morning. It had been agreed that he should take up the search for Johnny while Dorn and Pompee guarded camp and waited for much needed supplies that Dorn’s father had promised to send.
Rising and turning his back on the native trail, he began making his way back down the stream.
He had not gone a quarter of a mile before the trail left the bed of the stream to go branching away up the slope of a wooded hill.
Shadows were falling fast. It would soon be quite dark. As the boy hastened on, a breeze sweeping in from the sea fanned his cheek. It fanned something else; an all but burned out camp fire gleamed out anew.
This sudden flash of red caught the boy’s eye. Turning sharply to the right, he took a dozen steps, then paused in sudden astonishment.
As he stood there before the mildly glowing camp fire he fancied himself Robinson Crusoe. On the sands of the beach had he come upon an abandoned cannibal camp?
“And they do say that these Haitian natives, some of them, descended from cannibals and are not too sure to be free from cannibalism,” he told himself.
A cold chill ran up his spine. All about him were the evidences of a recently completed feast. Bones and scraps of half roasted flesh were everywhere. He thought of his missing friend and shuddered afresh.
A cloud obscured the setting sun. The world went dark. The boy found himself paralyzed with overpowering fear.