nd there were times
when I felt that I just had to yell and jump out into the black hole
around us. Taggart showed it worse than me. It took us an hour to
traverse that ledge. We'd strike a short turn where there wouldn't be
more than six or eight inches of ledge between us and eternity, and we
couldn't see a thing--I've thought since that maybe it was a good thing
we couldn't. But we could feel the width of the ledge with our feet,
and there were times when my legs shook under me like I had the ague.
Taggart was pretty near collapse all the time. He kept mumbling to
himself, making queer little throaty noises and grabbing at me. Two or
three times I had to turn and talk to him, or he'd have let go all
holds and jumped.

"We finally made solid ground, and it was a full hour before me or
Taggart could get up after we'd sat down, we were that tuckered out.
The girl didn't seem to mind it a bit; she told me she'd discovered the
secret passage that way. She'd been nosing around the mountain one day
and had crept along the edge, finding that it led to the treasure cave.

"There wasn't any time lost by us in getting away from that place.
Ezela told us there wasn't any use hoping that Nebraska and Taylor were
alive, because the canyon was over a thousand feet deep and there was a
roaring river at the bottom. I don't like to think of that fall.

"Taggart objected to Ezela going with us, but I couldn't think of
letting her stay to be punished by her tribe for what she'd
done--they'd have burned her, sure, she said. Besides, I may as well
tell the truth, I'd got to liking Ezela a good bit by this time. She
was good to look at, and she'd been hanging around me, telling me that
she wanted to go with us, and that she'd done what she had for my sake,
because she liked me. All that sort of stuff plays on a man's vanity
when it comes from a pretty girl, and it didn't take me long to decide
that I was in love with her and that, aside from humane reasons, I
ought to take her with me. So I took her.

"We reached the boat after a week of heart-breaking travel, and we
hadn't got over two miles out in the bay when we saw that we hadn't
left any too soon. A hundred or so Toltecs were on the beach, doing a
war dance and waving their spears at us. We had a pretty close call of
it for grub, but we made a little town on the gulf and stocked up, and
then we headed for the mouth of the Rio Grande. We camped one night a
week later