ing goes wrong. It looks to me as though there
was a chance for us of some sort here, and I mean to see what it is."

Young and I stood on each side of Rayburn and held him by the arms as he
seated himself on the idol's head. Borne down by his weight, the head
slowly sank, the whole fore-end of the stone slab falling away into the
rock, and the after-end correspondingly rising and disclosing a squared
opening, through which came a strong burst of light. When the head was
down to the level of the rock, and the slab stood up at an angle of
nearly fifty degrees, the movement ceased. Looking into the opening we
saw a flight of a dozen stone steps. On the bottom step the sun shone
brightly, and in our faces blew a draught of fresh, sweet air. On the
rock, beside the stair-way was carved the King's symbol, with the arrow
pointing downward.

"Hurrah!" cried Young. "Here's a way out--an' it looks as if that old
monk an' th' Cacique weren't such a pair of blasted liars after all!"

Rayburn jumped up to have a look with the rest of us; but before he
could see anything the statue had fallen into place again and the
opening was closed. "No matter, we know how to work it, now," he said.
"We must prop it up somehow; that's all. I want to have a look at this
thing. There's some mighty good engineering shown in the way the centre
of gravity of that stone has been calculated; and there's a good
mechanism in the way it's hung. Here she goes again. Just chock it with
a bit of rock when I swing it open."

"Well, what I'm interested in," said Young, "is findin' out what sort of
a place it'll get us into. It looks to me as if we might be goin' to
strike the treasure right smack here."

Much the same notion was in all of our heads by this time, and we were
full of eagerness--the statue having been swung again, and propped in
place with a fragment of rock--as we went down the little stair. But
what we found was only a continuation of the canon--as though, by some
curious freak of nature, the thin walls of rock enclosing the cave had
been left thus in the very middle of it. Rayburn drew our attention to
the fact that we were on the crest of a divide, for a spring that
bubbled up here flowed away from us; and this also was a cheering sign
that the canon had an outlet. How far away the outlet might be we could
not tell; for the canon, half a mile or so from where we stood, bent
sharply to the right. But being thus assured that a way of some s