ork of damp vegetation toward the spot from
which the signal had come.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XII

THE DEVIL DANCERS

The snaky vines seemed to us to be leagued with Leith as we tried to
force our way to the spot where the tiny flash of light had appeared
amongst the rocks. The lawyer-vines gripped our ankles and flung us upon
our faces scores of times, but we scrambled to our feet and rushed on.
Kaipi had made the discovery at an opportune moment. Now that we were
certain that Leith contemplated treachery, the wait through the long
night would have maddened us. We wanted to meet him quickly, and
instinct told us that the appointment place mentioned in the note was
identical with the spot to which we were fighting our way.

We were bruised and bleeding when we reached the foot of the black
cliffs whose perpendicular walls towered above us. We were almost
certain that the light had been flashed from a point immediately above
the spot where we came face to face with the barrier, but the scaling of
the black barricade was a proposition that seemed incapable of solution
as we rushed along the base.

"This is the spot," gasped Holman. "This big tree cluster was just to
the right of the place where the light was flashed."

"That's so," I remarked, "but how are we to get up to the point where
the signal came from?"

We raced madly up and down the front of the strange black wall, hunting
eagerly for a place that offered the slightest foothold by which we
could climb to the terraces that we could see far above, but the search
was a futile one. The tremendous mountain of ebony rock appeared to have
been driven up out of the earth during some volcanic disturbance, and as
we stumbled blindly along we thought it would be easier to scale the
outside wall of a New York skyscraper than the slippery sides of the
obstruction in our path.

It was Holman who found a key to the situation. The big clump of maupei,
or Pacific chestnut, that we had taken as a landmark when we were
running through the moonlit night, grew close to the barrier, and the
limbs of several of the trees scraped the sides of the basalt columns as
the faint night breeze moved them backward and forward.

"There's a ledge up there," whispered the youngster. "Look! It's about
fifty feet from the ground. If we could climb a tree we might be able to
reach it from one of the limbs."

He had hardly outlined the proposition before we were swarming up the
tr