“We’ve seen the last of him,” Johnny told himself as he rose to take a long breath. “I must be getting back to camp. Dorn and old Pompee will think something has happened to me.”
As he made his way rapidly over a narrow path, down a slope and up the other side, then through a dark and tangled forest, his thoughts were busy.
“Big piece of nonsense, this search for the ‘Rope of Gold’,” he told himself. “May never have existed. Anyway, we’ll never find it. Fascinating though, and lots of fun, this search; and life can’t be all work.”
They had worked, he and Curlie Carson. For two months, under the Professor’s direction, they had taught native children the simplest rudiments of learning, had assisted native planters at their work and had taught them new methods of tilling the soil.
It had been a short summer and now, only a few days more and he, Johnny, hoped to be going back to the States. And Curlie Carson, the strange lad with the wanderlust and a bent for inventions, would go elsewhere too.
They had heard many times of the ‘Rope of Gold’; a very fancy rope it had been, hand-wrought with flowers of white gold and leaves of green gold woven through it, so the story ran.
When the native emperor, the magnificent Christophe, was at the height of his power, this rope of gold had been strung through loops of silver all the way down the sides of the massive steps that led up to his palace. A hundred feet long it was. When rolled up it required two men to carry it. When revolution threatened, so the story ran, the emperor had hidden the rope away in the Citadel and there it remained to this day. But where?
This was the question the two boys had tried to solve. Thus far they had made no headway. The ancient walls, the dungeons, and secret passages had yielded nothing more valuable than dust, bats, rats and general decay.
“It’s something one’s not likely soon to forget,” the boy told himself.
He fell to musing on the life of that native emperor and the fortification he had built.