vice, nodded as though satisfied,
wrenched away several more stones, laying these down silently and
beckoned Stuart to come beside him.

The boy looked down on a circular hall, the outer arc of which was
pierced with ruined windows opening to the sky.

"Leborge will sit there!" whispered Manuel, pointing. "Kill him, and you
will be rich!"

Stuart nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

Walking as silently as he could, Manuel left the place, pondering in his
own mind what he was going to do with the boy. Should he reveal the
secret and have his fellow-conspirators kill him? Should he turn him
over to the machetes of the negroes? Or should he kill the boy, himself?
One thing he had determined--that Stuart should not reach the plains
below, alive.

And Stuart, in that hole of the ruined wall, crouched and watched. Of
what was to happen in that room below, what dark plot he was to hear, he
had no knowledge. Yet, over his eager desire to find out this conspiracy
against the United States, above his anxiety with regard to the fate of
his father, one question loomed in ever larger and blacker proportions--

He had got into the Citadel. How was he to get out?

CHAPTER IV

THE GHOST OF CHRISTOPHE

Manuel was no coward. Somewhere, back in his Spanish ancestry, had been
a single drop of an Irish strain, adding a certain combativeness to the
gallantry of his race. That drop, too, mixed badly with Spanish
treachery, and made him doubly dangerous.

Certainly the Cuban was no coward. But, as he came out from the murk of
those chambers with their rotting floors, many of them undermined by
oubliettes and dungeons, he felt a chill of fear. Even the occasional
bursts of sunshine through the cloud-fog which perpetually sweeps over
La Ferriere did not hearten him. He passed into the open space back of
the outer walls and set himself to climb the long flight of stone steps
that led to the battlements, where, he thought, his fellow conspirators
might be. But, on the summit, he found himself alone.

The battlements cowed his spirits. With walls fifteen feet thick, wide
enough to allow a carriage to be driven upon them, they looked over a
sheer drop of two thousand feet. Sinister and forbidding, even the
sunlight could not lessen their grimness.

As if in memory of the hundreds of victims who had been bidden jump off
those ramparts, merely for Christophe's amusement, or who had been
hurled, screaming, as penalty for h