“I don’t know where. I only know we have arrived,” said Johnny. “Hurry. Waken that native girl. We must get out of this boat.”
CHAPTER XI
THE DRUMS
During the very hour in which Johnny Thompson discovered that he and the two girls, Doris and Nieta, were stowaways in a strange schooner sailing straight out to sea, Curlie Carson sat beside a mahogany table beneath the stars in a beautiful tropical garden.
The air was heavy with the perfume of flowers. The night was cool and damp. Now and then a breeze from the distant sea set the palm fronds rustling and brought forth a hoarse croak from a sleeping buzzard.
Back of him was a home. And such a home as it was! All white and glistening in the moonlight, with its little spires and minarets, with its broad, deep, mysterious windows, standing tall against the dark green of palms it seemed some castle in Spain—a thing of dreams.
But the home, a sort of French Chateau, was real. Haiti has thousands of beautiful homes. Some of them hark back to the days when fine French ladies rode out with their maids in the cool of the evening, and a hundred thousand slaves toiled in the sugar cane and the cotton.
The girl who sat opposite Curlie sipping limeade was real too. To Curlie at first she had been rather startling as well. She was Dot Montcalm, Dorn’s sister. To Curlie she was a great deal more than that. She was the mysterious dark-haired girl who had shared his adventure of the night before. She it had been who had beaten the strange native drum and had called together that band of half wild natives to dance and to plot revolution beneath the stars. She too had raced away with him down the trail after the weird howling of her dog had put the natives to flight. All this she smilingly admitted on meeting Curlie two hours before. He had not asked her why she had concealed her identity. There was no reason for asking. A girl with good sense, and Dot Montcalm seemed well endowed with that by nature, does not reveal her identity to a stranger during a chance meeting.
“But she has told me nothing else,” Curlie was thinking to himself, as they sat there in the garden before the girl’s home. “Why did she beat out the drum signals that called that wild band together to plot revolution. Surely she and her father would be the last to desire a revolution. In truth she seemed eager to scatter them before plotting was begun. It’s all very strange.”
Curlie had arrived at camp a little before noon of that day. He had, as you well know, found Johnny still missing. After visiting his laboratory and finding all in order, he had heavily bolted the door and then had announced his intention of going to Dorn’s village in search of some clue of Johnny’s whereabouts.
“Some natives may have seen him. He may have arrived at the village over a strange trail,” he had said to Dorn.