“Now! Now’s the time.”
Bending his bow for a quick aim, he let fly. Then such a screaming and whirring of wings! A whole covey of wild guinea fowl went wheeling and screaming away into the sunset. A whole covey? Not quite. A fat young cock lay still upon a flat rock. He had been shot through and through by one of Johnny’s arrows.
“Supper!” the boy exulted as he lifted the bird from the rock and retrieved his arrow.
There were dry branches to be had from the trees in the nearest run. These were rapidly converted into a heap of glowing coals. Lacking a kettle for boiling his fowl, Johnny first plucked off the feathers then rolled it in a two inch coat of red clay. After that he buried it, clay and all, beneath a great mound of glowing coals and sat down to await results.
“Life,” he told himself as he sat there with the abandoned home at his back, “is strange. Here was this chap who made this place a home. To him five dollars a year was a fortune. Wild guineas shot or snared, bananas and mangoes growing in the runs, corn from the hills, goat’s meat and goat’s milk, all to be had for the asking. These were his. And clothes,” he chuckled, “down here a long shirt and a broad smile makes a wonderful suit, better than the best dress suit a tailor ever made.
“But back where I came from,” he mused on, “a dress suit, a business suit, golf suit, top coat, winter coat, rain coat, high shoes, oxfords, golf shoes, tennis shoes, scarfs, shirts, collars, socks by the dozen. Men work days, nights and sometimes Sundays for a living wage. And how much is a living wage? Two thousand, three thousand, five thousand dollars. Poor souls! They grow gray and go to hospitals, sanitariums, and early graves. And here a man lives well enough on five dollars a year.”
Seizing a stout stick he scattered the coals to right and left. An oval mound of hard, baked clay lay before him. This he cracked with a rock and behold! Before him lay a feast fit for a king, a guinea fowl baked in clay among the coals.
As he lay down to sleep on that narrow shelf beneath the rafters, he tried to imagine the natures of those who had slept there before him. Their images did not linger long for he was soon lost in slumber.
CHAPTER VIII
THE YELLOW SNAKE’S TEETH
Dorn looked at the Citadel and all connected with it through the big, round eyes of a young boy. Nothing would do but his fair-haired American cousin, Doris, must climb all those stone steps leading up to the top of the Citadel, there to peer down into the dark hole that had been Johnny’s prison and from which he had mysteriously vanished.