Plotting in Pirate Seas Part 6

"When I was but a little older than a boy like you, into the Vache d'Or (a former gambling-house of some fame) there strolled this Dimanche Esnan. He swaggered in, as one with plenty of money in his pocket.

"Upon the table he threw some coins.

"The croupier stared down at those coins, with eyes as cold and fixed as those of a fer-de-lance ready to strike. The play at the table stopped.

"It was a moment!

"The coins were Spanish doubloons!"

"A pirate h.o.a.rd?" suggested Stuart.

"It was thought. But this Dimanche had not been off the island for years! And the buccaneers' treasure is at Tortugas, as is well known.

"This Dimanche was at once asked if he had found Christophe's treasure, for where else would a man find Spanish doubloons of a century ago? It was plain, Yes!

"Well, what would you? President Hippolyte sent for him. He offered to make him a general, a full general, if he would but tell where he had found the treasure. He showed him the uniform. It was gold laced, yes, gold lace all over! Dimanche was nearly tempted, but not quite.

"Then they let him come back here, to Cap Haitien, Yes. All the day and all the night he was kept under watch. Ah, that was a strict watch!

Every one of the guards thought that he might be the one to get clue to the place of the buried treasure, look you!

"But the general here, at that time, was not a patient man, No! Besides, he wanted the treasure. He wanted it without having the President of the Republic know. With sixty-five million gourdes he might push away the President and be president himself, who knows?

"What would you? The general put Dimanche in prison and put him to the question (torture) but Dimanche said nothing. Ah, he was stubborn, that Dimanche. He said nothing, nothing! The general did not dare to kill him, for he knew that the President had given orders to have the man watched.

"So the prison doors were set open. Pouf! Away disappears Dimanche and has not been seen since. He still carries the secret of the treasure of Christophe--that is, if he is not dead."

"But didn't the President try to find the h.o.a.rd on his own account?"

asked Stuart.

"But, most surely! My father was one of the soldiers in the party which searched in all the wonderful palaces that Christophe had built for himself in 'Without Worry,' in 'Queen's Delight,' in 'The Glory,' in 'Beautiful View,' yes, even in the haunted Citadel of La Ferriere. No, I should not have liked to do that, it is surely haunted. But they found nothing.

"Me, I think that the money is in the citadel. Has not the ghost of Christophe been seen to walk there? And why should the ghost walk if it had not a reason to walk? Eh?"

"That does seem reasonable," answered Stuart, in response to the soldier's triumphant tone.

"But, most sure! So, Boy," the guard concluded, "it is easy to see why the General does not like any 'white' to go to the Citadel. Perhaps the 'white,' whose horses you look after, has seen Dimanche. Who knows? So he will not be let get up there. You may be sure of that."

"One can't ever say," answered the boy. "I must be ready for the morning," and, with a word of farewell, he sauntered into the village of Millot, to find some kind of stabling and food for the horses, and, if possible, some shelter for himself.

Morning found Stuart outside the door of the general's "mansion," a straw-thatched building, comprising three rooms and a narrow brick-paved verandah. From what the soldiers had said the night before, the boy had not the slightest expectation of the Cuban's success.

He had not waited long, however, before Manuel came out through the door, obsequiously followed by a coal-black general daubed with gold lace--most of which was unsewn and hanging in tatters, and all of which was tarnished. He was strongly, even violently, urging upon Manuel the need of an escort. The Cuban not only disdained the question, but, most evidently, disdained and disregarded the man.

This extraordinary scene was closed by the General, the commandant of the entire commune, holding out his hand for a tip. Manuel put a five-gourdes bill (two dollars and a half) into the outstretched palm, and mounted his horse to an accompaniment of a profusion of thanks.

A short distance out of Millot, the two riders came to the ruins of Christophe's palace of "Without Worry" (Sans Souci). It was once a veritable palace, situated on the top of a small hill overlooking a deep ravine. Great flights of stone steps led up to it, while terrace upon terrace of what once were exquisitely kept gardens, filled with the finest statuary, stepped to the depths below.

Now, the gardens are waste, the statuary broken and the terraces are washed into gullies by the rains. The palace itself is not less lamentable. The walls are crumbling. Everything movable from the interior has been looted. Trees grow outward from the upper windows, and, in the cracks of masonry and marble floors, a tropic vegetation has sprung up. Moss covers the mosaics, and the carved woodwork has become the prey of the worm.

A little further on, at a hut which the General had described, Manuel and Stuart left their horses, and then began the steep climb up La Ferriere. From the steaming heat of the plain below, the climbers pa.s.sed into the region of cold. The remains of a road were there, but the track was so indistinct as to render it difficult to follow.

"Where the dense forest begins," Manuel explained, "we shall find a warder. 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.

s.e.x 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 "b.l.o.o.d.y 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 ma.s.sacred 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 his voice, but intensely interested in his own question.

"They have changed nothing!" declared the Cuban, emphatically. "They have painted the faces of the coast towns, and that is all. You heard that drum, the night before last? Not until the tom-tom has ceased to beat in Haiti, can anything be changed."

He rose, threw away the stump of his cigar, and motioned to the boy to take up the trail.

A few hundred yards higher, a raucous shout halted them.

There was a rustle of branches, and a negro colossus, of the low-browed, heavy-jawed type, plunged through the thicket and barred the path.

Bareheaded, barefooted, his shirt consisting of a piece of cloth with holes for head and arms, his trousers torn to tatters by thorns, the warder of the Citadel looked what he was, a Caco machete man, little removed from the ferocity of African savagery.

To his shout, the Cuban deigned no answer.

He broke a switch from a bush, walked toward the negro guard with a contemptuous look and lashed him across the face with the switch, ordering him to lead the way.

Stuart expected to see the Cuban cut down with one stroke of the machete.

Far from it. Cowed at once, the negro cringed, as to a master, and, without a word as to Manuel's authority, led the way up the trail.

A hundred yards higher, all sign of a path was lost. The negro warder was compelled to use his machete to cut a way through th.o.r.n.y underbrush and creepers in order to make a path for the "white's" feet.

The afternoon was well advanced when openings amid the trees showed, beetling overhead, the gray walls of the Citadel. An hour's further climbing brought them to the guard-house, where eight men watch continually, each relief for a period of a month, against the intrusion of strangers into Christophe's Citadel.

An irregularly disposed clump of posts, stuck into the ground, supported a rusted and broken tin roof, without walls, but boasting a brushwood pile on one side--such was the entire barracks of the La Ferriere garrison. The furniture consisted only of a log on which to sit, a few cooking utensils, and a pile of rags in the driest corner.

True, there was plenty of room in the Citadel. Many a chamber in the ruined place was dry and sheltered from the weather, many a corner was there where the watchers could have made themselves warm and comfortable. They were not forbidden to sleep there. On the contrary, they were encouraged. But never a one would do so. They declared the place haunted and were in a state of terror even to be near it.