heir perilous path were wider, they began to wish that they had
not sacked Loma.

Had that path been any wider the sacking of Loma must indeed have been
harder for them, for the citizens must have fortified the city but
that the awful narrowness of that ten-league pass of the hills had
made their crag-surrounded city secure. And at last an Indian had
said, "Come, let us sack it." Grimly they laughed in the wigwams. Only
the eagles, they said, had ever seen it, its hoard of emeralds and its
golden gods; and one had said he would reach it, and they answered,
"Only the eagles."

It was Laughing Face who said it, and who gathered thirty braves and
led them into Loma with their tomahawks and their bows; there were
only four left now, but they had the loot of Loma on a mule. They had
four golden gods, a hundred emeralds, fifty-two rubies, a large silver
gong, two sticks of malachite with amethyst handles for holding
incense at religious feasts, four beakers one foot high, each carved
from a rose-quartz crystal; a little coffer carved out of two
diamonds, and (had they but known it) the written curse of a priest.
It was written on parchment in an unknown tongue, and had been slipped
in with the loot by a dying hand.

From either end of that narrow, terrible ledge the third night was
closing in; it was dropping down on them from the heights of the
mountain and slipping up to them out of the abyss, the third night
since Loma blazed and they had left it. Three more days of tramping
should bring them in triumph home, and yet their instincts said that
all was scarcely well. We who sit at home and draw the blinds and shut
the shutters as soon as night appears, who gather round the fire when
the wind is wild, who pray at regular seasons and in familiar shrines,
know little of the demoniac look of night when it is filled with
curses of false, infuriated gods. Such a night was this. Though in the
heights the fleecy clouds were idle, yet the wind was stirring
mournfully in the abyss and moaning as it stirred, unhappily at first
and full of sorrow; but as day turned away from that awful path a very
definite menace entered its voice which fast grew louder and louder,
and night came on with a long howl. Shadows repeatedly passed over the
stars, and then a mist fell swiftly, as though there were something
suddenly to be done and utterly to be hidden, as in very truth there
was.

And in the chill of that mist the four tall men prayed to