. I would rather be without him, but the General does not dare to
send a message that a 'white' may visit the Citadel unaccompanied.
Besides, I doubt if we could find the way, though once this was a wide
road, fit for carriage travel, on which the Black Emperor drove in pomp
and state to his citadel. It is incredible!"

"What is incredible?" asked Stuart.

"That Christophe should have been able to make these negroes work for
him as no people in the world have worked since the days when the
Pharaohs of Egypt built the Pyramids. You will see the vast size of the
Citadel. You see the steepness of the mountain. Consider it!

"The materials for the whole huge pile of building and the three hundred
cannon with which it was fortified, were dragged up these steep mountain
scarps and cliffsides by human hands. Christophe employed the troops
mercilessly in this labor and subdued mutiny by the simple policy of not
only shooting the mutineers, but also a corresponding number of innocent
men, as well, just to teach a lesson. Whole villages were commandeered.
Sex made no difference. Women worked side by side with men, were whipped
side by side with men, and, if they weakened, were knifed or shot and
thrown into a ditch. One of Christophe's overseers is said to have
boasted that he could have made a roadway of human bones from Sans Souci
to the summit."

The words "bloody ruffian" were on Stuart's lips, but, just in time, he
remembered his character, and replied instead,

"But Christophe was a great man!"

The boy knew well that though Toussaint L'Ouverture, the "Black
Napoleon," had truly been a great man in every sense of the word, a
liberator, general and administrator, the Haitians think little of him,
because he believed that blacks, mulattoes and whites should have an
equal chance. Dessalines and Christophe, monsters of brutality, are the
heroes of Haiti, because they massacred everyone who was not coal-black.

Manuel cast a sidelong glance at Stuart, smiling inwardly at the boy's
attempt to maintain his disguise, that disguise which the Cuban had so
quickly pierced, and shrugged his shoulders.

"What would you!" he rejoined. "You see yourself, it is the only
government that Haitians understand. To this day, a century later, this
part of the island is better than the south, because of the impress of
the reign of Christophe. Nothing changes Haiti!"

"The Americans?" queried Stuart, trying to put a note of dislike into
h