called
herself Ezela, showed us that getting the bridge back wasn't possible
without help from our side. She said that the priest she'd dumped down
into the canyon was the only one with the tribe at the time; the others
had gone to a distant village. She said, too, that there was a secret
passage from the cave; she'd discovered it, and no one but her and the
priests knew anything about it, but that the Toltecs would send runners
for the priests and we'd have to get out before they came, or they'd
lay for us at the outlet.

"Well, we hustled. We felt bad about Nebraska and Taylor, and were
determined not to leave without some of the treasure, and after Ezela
showed us where it was I kept her busy talking while Taggart got about
as much as he could carry. Ezela offered no objections; on the other
hand, when Taggart came back she told me to get some of the treasure
too. Taggart hadn't taken enough to miss; there were millions of
dollars' worth of gold and diamonds in the room, where they'd raised a
kind of an altar, and I had my choice.

"I took some of the gold, but what attracted me--not because it was
pretty, but because I saw in a minute that it was valuable--was a
hideous image about six inches high. I had had an idea all along that
Queza had been lying about the diamonds, but when I saw the image I
knew he'd told the truth. There were about a hundred diamonds on the
image, stuck all around it, the image itself being gold. The diamonds
ran from a carat to seven or eight carats, and there was no question
about them being the real thing. I stuck the thing into a hip pocket,
figuring that with the few other ornaments I had I would have plenty to
carry. Then I went back to where Ezela and Taggart were waiting for me.

"Ezela led us through a long, narrow passage, down some steps to
another passage, and pretty soon we were sneaking along this and I
began to get a whiff of fresh air. In a little while we found
ourselves on a narrow ledge in the canyon, about thirty or forty feet
below the level where the bridge had been, and it was so dark down
there that we couldn't see one another.

"Ezela whispered to us to follow her, and to be careful. We had to be
careful, and after what had happened, crawling along that ledge wasn't
the most cheerful job in the world. It would have been a ticklish
thing to do in the daytime, but at night it was a thousand times worse.
I kept thinking about poor Taylor and Nebraska, a