Half the hot afternoon was gone when we had climbed to the end of that path. It was at the bottom of a hundred-foot wall. Carlos pointed to where there was to be found a door, sheltered from view by the brush. We did not venture too close, for it was certain the door would be fast, and we planned to try for an entry by a ruse. Carlos knew a call that was much used by these blacks of Duran's, and he was confident he could make it serve our purpose.
So we laid our trap. Norris and Robert crawled cautiously into the bushes up to either side of the door, Robert armed with a strong cord, that Carlos plaited of long grasses. Carlos then sent out his call. It sounded much like the screech of a sea-gull. He repeated it three or four times, and waited. Then again he gave the call. In a minute, now, came an answer from high overhead. Another little space, and that door opened, and a black came forth.
Norris pounced on him, bearing him down, one hand on the black's mouth, to prevent an outcry. Robert soon had the bonds on the fellow's wrists, and the others of us moved forward.
Captain Marat spoke to the black in French. He told him he must answer us truthfully, on pain of torture; and he had Norris give him a twist of the arm for a sample. And so we got it out of the man that Duran was not in the fortress, and that there were three children there, brought this day; one, he admitted was white. There were seven men there, two of them armed.
Then, with a gun at his back, the black was ordered to lead the way.
It was a long climb, by stone steps; then came a long corridor. At last a room, where was a fire and cookery, utilizing a break in the wall, looking on the court, for a fireplace.
The six men, and the voodoo woman, at the cooking, were taken unawares, their two rifles confiscated, and they were lined up against the wall; Norris patting his rifle and winking, to accentuate what Marat was telling them in the French.
The three children sat on the floor in a corner: two of them blacks, about three years of age each—and little Marie Cambon, looking like her portrait, but now big-eyed and dazed with trying to realize the meaning of this new appearance. I divined the prelude to a storm; so I hurried over and took her up in my arms. "Little Marie!" I said. And then burst forth that flood. You have seen children cry. It continued till she was exhausted; and then she sobbed long in her sleep. She wouldn't let me put her down; even while she slept, my attempt to relinquish her little body invariably awakened her. For two hours I must carry her, and we were far from that place before she would let me rest my arms.
The two little pickaninnies were taken on, and we went off the way we had come, leaving the seven blacks to reflect on the words of a lecture Jean Marat delivered them on the evil of their ways, and to consider how they were to account to their lord and master—and papaloi—Duran, for the loss of the three "goats without horns."
Night sprung upon us before we reached the Brill cottage. And it was truly a happy throng that gathered there. Melie bustled about preparing a supper, between whiles crooning over the three little ones—white and black.