ed our climbing powers in the next ten minutes. With the
agility of a chamois he scurried along the narrow ledges, and several
times Maru was forced to check his speed so that we could keep pace with
him. Holman's face showed the joy he felt at receiving another
opportunity to retrieve the blunders we had made in our two previous
attacks. Now we had reduced the big villain's fighting bodyguard to two
persons, Soma and the dancer, and if he had not impressed the carriers,
we outnumbered him. But Leith was on his own ground, and we had already
discovered that the Isle of Tears made an ideal retreat for an outlaw.
The nearly impassable jungle, surrounded by the cliffs that were
tunnelled with tremendous caverns, made a hiding place in which a few
men could defy an army.

One Eye moved along the side of the cliff for about five hundred yards,
then turned into a small canon hardly thirty feet wide, the bottom of
which was about twenty yards above the valley from which we had climbed.

Our intuition told us that we were near the retreat, and we halted the
hurrying guide, and in the shelter of a boulder explained to him with
more signs and gestures that we wished to proceed with extreme caution.
The end of the gulch that was not more than a stone's throw from the
face of the cliff was already dark with the shadows of the hills, and as
we suspected that the opening to Leith's refuge was close, we wished to
make no unnecessary noise in approaching it. Using the scattered rocks
as covering, we advanced slowly, but before we reached the end the sun
had disappeared, and the absence of twilight, noticeable in that
latitude, compelled us to crawl along in a darkness that made it
impossible to discern any object that was more than three feet distant.
Holman was on one side of One Eye while Maru guarded him on the other
side, and as the bottom of the gorge made it impossible for more than
three to move abreast, Kaipi and I crawled in the rear.

We were at One Eye's mercy at that moment, but the idiot appeared to be
much impressed by the manner in which we had pictured the sure and
sudden fate that would fall upon him if we suspected him of treachery.
The mystery of the place gripped us as we went forward. High above us
the stars looked as if they were floating sequins in a sea of dark blue.

But the stars were blotted out suddenly, and I drew Holman's attention
to the fact. The youngster got to his feet and groped around in the
gloo