The Rope of Gold / A Mystery Story for Boys

by Roy J. Snell

He dared not move. He studied the girl. She seemed frightened, about to flee; yet she remained there motionless. As they crouched there a fourth, a fifth, sixth, eighth, tenth, twelfth figure passed across the star-lit clearing.

In time he lost much of his fear. The natives were some distance away. There was the girl and her dog. The girl might need protection. He doubted this, and curiosity came to take the place of fear. So he lingered.

The thing he was about to witness might seem to belong to those long lost days on the Hudson that Washington Irving is so fond of writing about. Be that as it may the strange panorama of that hour will never pass from his memory.

Somewhere in the dark, a drum was struck. At the same instant a dusky figure darted to the center of the spot of ground before him and as if by magic flames leaped up. After that came the steady red glow of a slow fire.

Again the drum, again and yet again. Figures appeared. They began leaping about the fire. Like black ghosts they were now within the circle of light and now lost within the shadows.

“Why did they come to this spot?” he asked himself. “There are a thousand grass grown clearings in the hills.”

There could be but one answer to this. The girl had drummed. Had she meant them to come? If so, then why had she hidden? Why did she seem so much afraid?

At once his mind was filled with pictures of the past. All the sad and tragic history of the island of Haiti, all the bright days, too, passed before his mind’s eye.

The brief, bright, glorious days of the French Colony, bright for a few, dark for many slaves, came and went.

The drum was beating now. Rolling, throbbing, singing, if a drum may be said to sing, it was telling out the story of the uprising of the natives and the slaves; telling how just such a goat’s head drum had sent out the signals, how another, another and yet a hundred others had taken up the notes until all the island heard. Down through all the bright and bitter years, of rebellion, war, slavery and freedom, the drums had played their part.