"You're the biggest baby of the five!" he roared. "You're a madman! Come away, Verslun; it's no use arguing with him!"

The Professor gave an indignant snort, straightened his small body, as if he contemplated an attack upon the youngster, then dashed madly back to the fire, where we watched him bobbing his head up and down as he spoke to the two girls. His confidence in the rascal who was possibly luring him to his death was pitiful to see, and we recognized at that moment that it would be useless to waste any further arguments with him.

"We've got to get out of this sc.r.a.pe by our own efforts," muttered Holman. "The girls won't leave him, worse luck. If they would I'd turn tail this minute and make an attempt to fight our way back to the yacht."

"And I doubt if you will find a haven there," I remarked. "That bilious captain was in a great hurry to send word to Leith that I had got safely by his farewell bombardment. We're in for it, old man, and we might as well realize the fact right now."

"You're not sorry I found you on that pile of pearl sh.e.l.l?"

"Sorry?" I cried. "I'm glad, man--I'm infernally glad."

Holman gripped my hand, and then we crawled through the bushes toward the spot where Soma and Leith had started off on their supposed work of exploration.

"What can we do?" I asked.

"Wait round here and pot him when he is coming back," said the youngster cheerfully. "But we should let the girls know something, shouldn't we?

That old fool will tell them a garbled account that will frighten them out of their wits. One of us had better go and try to quiet their fears."

"You go then," I remarked. "I'll wait here till you come back."

Holman crept quietly toward the campfire, and I waited in the undergrowth. The moon was rising in the east and a soft gray light wiped out the intense blackness that had come upon the place after the short twilight. The tops of the cliffs toward which we were journeying were tipped by a brilliant thread of silver as the moon peeped above their ramparts, and I crept deeper into the shadows as the full glory of the glowing orb turned the night into day.

I had waited some thirty minutes for Holman when I noticed a movement beneath a small bush some fifteen paces to my right. I watched the spot without moving, and presently a dark figure crept out of the shelter and moved cautiously toward the camp. Convinced that the visitor was Soma, I pulled out my revolver and waited, wondering as I watched what he intended to do.

The black figure came closer. He paused to listen to the sounds that came from the fire, and as he lifted his head the moonlight fell across his face, and I put the revolver back in my pocket.

"Kaipi," I murmured.

The Fijian crept quietly to the spot where I was hiding.

"I come for you," he muttered.

"Why?"

"Funny things much," he gurgled. "Light on mountain, no see from here.

Me watch it, think it something bad. Come, I'll show you."

Holman returned at that moment and I explained what Kaipi had just told me.

"The devil!" muttered the youngster. "The note said that he would meet them at the Long Gallery. See, the light is not visible from our camp, and the brute never thought that one of us would be far enough from the camp to notice it. If it's a signal we might be able to reach the spot and see what is actually going on. If we leave things till to-morrow I'm afraid we'll be too late."

"But the girls?" I cried.

"We'll get back," he replied. "I told them how everything is, Verslun, and they're not afraid. Edith has an automatic pistol that she brought from the yacht, and she'll use it if she is forced to. Come on!"

We followed Kaipi into the shadows, the Fijian picking his way with wonderful instinct through the clumps. At about half a mile from the camp he stopped and pointed to the cliffs.

"Me see light flash way over there," he whispered. "You wait and see."

We crouched down and waited. The minutes pa.s.sed slowly, but the black barrier away to the east gave no sign of life.

"I think Kaipi must have sighted a star," muttered Holman. "There is nothing--"

He broke off abruptly and gripped my arm. High up in the basalt barrier, at a spot about three quarters of a mile from where we were crouched, a tiny flame suddenly appeared, blazed for an instant, then died away again. Three times it flared up and as quickly died away, but at the third disappearance Holman and I, with the vengeance-seeking Kaipi, were struggling through the network of damp vegetation toward the spot from which the signal had come.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 cl.u.s.ter 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 skysc.r.a.per 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 trunk, Holman in the lead by right of discovery, and the nimble Kaipi in the rear. Higher and higher the youngster climbed into the thick green foliage. He reached the topmost branches, and selecting one that led toward the rocky wall, he straddled it and worked his way slowly forward.

Kaipi and I clung to the fork of the limb and waited, and as I watched Holman the wisdom of our actions was a.s.sailed by a cold doubt. We had left the two girls entirely unprotected, and if Leith reached the camp before we returned, and heard from the chattering Professor the story of the finding of the sc.r.a.p of paper, it would be reasonable to suppose that he would consider the moment had arrived for the perpetration of any deviltry he had planned.

But Holman's actions interrupted my mental criticism of the wisdom of our plans. The youngster had reached the extreme end of the limb, and he was clawing madly at the rock to obtain a footing. He succeeded after a five minutes' struggle, and he sent a breathless whisper back to our perch.

"There's a ledge here," he murmured. "I think we can climb up from it.

Hurry along, and I'll give you a hand."

I needed a hand when I reached the end of that leafy seesaw. I was much heavier than the boy, and the limb could hardly support my weight when I neared the end. Holman reached out his hand at a moment when I thought that a drop through the air would be my reward for attempting aerial exhibitions, and the next moment I was beside him on a little projection that barely gave us a footing.

"It's easy climbing just above us," whispered Holman. "Wait till we get Kaipi."

The Fijian came along the limb with the agility of a trapeze artist, and when he reached the ledge we stared up at the dizzy heights that rose above our little resting place. Small jutting projections, like gargoyles, stuck out from the wall, and we looked at them hungrily.

"If we had only brought the rope!" cried the boy. "Say, Verslun, put your face against the rock and I'll climb on to your shoulders."

I did so, and the youngster climbed up cautiously. For a long time he stood there, peering around in an effort to discover a path by which we could go upward and onward, but at last he stepped off, and I looked up to find him clinging to the wall like a huge beetle. A pack of fat clouds that had harried the moon during the earlier part of the evening now closed in upon her, and we were in complete darkness. The threshing limb of the maupei tree that was within a yard or two of the spot where Kaipi and I stood waiting disappeared in the night, and the scratching of Holman's shoes high above our heads came down to us through the intense silence and proved that he was holding his position with difficulty.

A small piece of shale hit me on the shoulder after a long wait, and I turned my face upward.