had led forward,
mounted another mule himself, and gave some rapid orders.

"Follow me and ride carefully, senorita, for there are some steep and
dangerous paths to negotiate," he called to Myra. "Mendoza will lead
your mule at the most perilous places. _Avanzar!_"

To anyone less accustomed to riding and to taking risks than Myra, that
night ride through the mountains of the Sierra Morena would have been a
blood-curdling and nerve-shattering experience. Often she had to guide
her mule along a rough path barely a couple of yards wide, with a sheer
drop of hundreds of feet on one side, a path where a stumble or a false
step on the part of the animal would have meant certain death.

Yet Myra was conscious of no sense of fear now, and the dangers only
made her pulse beat faster and stirred her blood. But it was no easy
task riding a mule along precipitous paths and keeping her seat while
slithering down slopes, clad as she was in only a filmy evening frock
and a fur coat, and she cried out in protest at last:

"How much further, Senor Cojuelo? I cannot sit this ungainly brute
much longer in these clothes."

"Courage, sweet lady, we have but a little further to go," Cojuelo
called back to her over his shoulder.

He spoke truly. A few minutes later the party halted in a narrow,
pitch-dark ravine, and Myra was lifted from her mule.

"Take my arm, senorita, lest you stumble in the darkness on the rough
ground," said the muffled voice of El Diablo Cojuelo. "The entrance to
my mountain eyrie is narrow and unprepossessing, but I promise you that
you shall find comfort within."

He pressed the switch of an electric torch as he spoke, and guided Myra
over rocky ground to what seemed a mere cleft in a wall of rock.

"You will notice that this entrance to my lair is only wide enough to
allow of the passage of one person at a time," he resumed. "Here a
handful of men could defy an Army Corps, and there are other means of
entry--and other ways of escape. I give you welcome, sweet lady, to
the fortress of El Diablo Cojuelo."

Myra, again with the sensation that the whole affair was a sort of
fantastic dream, squeezed through the cleft revealed by the light of
the electric torch, advanced two or three yards, passed through another
cleft at right-angles to the first, and stopped at Cojuelo's bidding.

"You perceive, senorita, that we seem to have come to a dead end," said
the bandit, flashing the light about. "What a